Dounce received his PhD in organic chemistry in 1935, the title of his thesis being "Study of dihydrofurans and the dehydration rearrangement of 2,3-ethylenic 1,4-diols".

[1] According to Marshall W. Nirenberg, another biochemist who knew Dounce personally, "during his [Dounce's] final doctoral exam when his doctoral committee got together to ask him questions after he had finished his thesis research, his mentor, Sumner, asked him the question, 'How do proteins synthesize other proteins?'

[3] In 1941, Dounce moved to the Department of Biochemistry at University of Rochester Medical School, where he worked on the mechanism of uranium poisoning for the Manhattan Project.

[8][9] This order of synthesis, which has later been termed the "central dogma of molecular biology" by Francis Crick, is textbook knowledge today.

"[2] When James D. Watson and George Gamow founded the RNA Tie Club in 1954, Dounce became one of its members; his designation was GLN (glutamine).

[13] For the remainder of his career, Dounce continued his research on nuclei and their contents, catalase, and protein crystallization.

He was survived by his wife, Anna Elizabeth Dounce, who was the daughter of botanist Donald Reddick,[14] and by their three children Helen, Eric, and George.