Grunberg-Manago was the first woman to lead the International Union of Biochemistry and the 400-year-old French Academy of Sciences.

Grunberg-Manago was born into a family of artists who adhered to the teachings of the Swiss educational reformer Johann Pestalozzi.

[citation needed] Grunberg-Manago studied biochemistry and, in 1955, while working in the lab of Spanish-American biochemist Severo Ochoa,[1] she discovered the first nucleic-acid-synthesizing enzyme.

Almost immediately, Marshall Nirenberg and J. Heinrich Matthaei put it to use to form the first three-nucleotide RNA codons, which coded for the amino acid phenylalanine.

[5] In 1959, Ochoa and Arthur Kornberg won the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for the synthesis of the nucleic acids RNA and DNA."