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Molecular diagram of a hypothetical tetranucleotide, as proposed (incorrectly) by Phoebus Levene around 1910.

Phoebus Aaron Theodore Levene, M.D. (25 February 1869 — 6 September 1940) was a biochemist who analyzed DNA and found that it contained adenine, guanine, thymine, cytosine, deoxyribose, and a phosphate group.

He was born into a Jewish family as Fishel Aaronovich Levin in Sagor in Lithuania, Russia but grew up in St. Petersburg (Petrograd). There he studied medicine at the Imperial Military Medical Academy (M.D., 1891) and developed an interest in biochemistry. In 1893, because of anti-Semitic pogroms, he and his family emigrated to the United States and he practiced medicine in New York.

Levene enrolled at Columbia University and in his spare time conducted biochemical research, publishing papers on the chemical structure of sugars. In 1896 he was appointed as an Associate in the Pathological Institute of the New York State Hospitals, but he had to take time off to recuperate from tuberculosis. During this period, he worked with several chemists, including Albrecht Kossel and Emil Fischer, who were the experts in proteins.

In 1905, Levene was appointed as head of the biochemical laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research. He spent the rest of his career at this institute, and it was there that he identified the components of DNA. (He had discovered ribose in 1909 and deoxyribose in 1929.) Not only did Levene identify the components of DNA, he also showed that the components were linked together in the order phosphate-sugar-base to form units. He called each of these units a nucleotide, and stated that the DNA molecule consisted of a string of nucleotide units linked together through the phosphate groups, which are the 'backbone' of the molecule. His ideas about the structure of DNA were wrong; he thought there were only four nucleotides per molecule. He even declared that it could not store the genetic code because it was chemically far too simple. However, his work was a key basis for the later work that determined the structure of DNA. Levene published over 700 original papers and articles on biochemical structures. Levene died in 1940, before the true significance of DNA became clear.

Levene is known for his "tetranucleotide hypothesis" (formulated around 1910) which first proposed that DNA was made up of equal amounts of adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. Before the later work of Erwin Chargaff, it was widely speculated that "tetranucleotides" might be organized in DNA molecules in a way that could not carry genetic information.

• "Phoebus Aaron Theodor Levene, 1869-1940" by R. S. Tipson (1957) in Advances in Carbohydrate Chemistry Volume 12, pages 1-12. Entrez PubMed 13617111.

• "On Chondrosamine" by P. A. Levene and F. B. La Forge in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (1915) Volume 1, pages 190–191. Full text at PMC: 16575974

• "The Structure of Nucleic Acids and Many Other Natural Products: Phoebus Aaron Levene" by Robert D. Simoni, Robert L. Hill, and Martha Vaughan in Journal of Biological Chemistry (2002) Volume 277, page 11. This short article by Simoni et al mentions scientific contributions including a paper by Levine called, "The Structure of Yeast Nucleic Acid. IV. Ammonia Hydrolysis" that was published in 1919.

v • d • e Discovery of the DNA Double Helix
William Astbury | Oswald Avery | Francis Crick | Erwin Chargaff | Max Delbrück | Jerry Donohue | Rosalind Franklin | Raymond Gosling | Phoebus Levene | Linus Pauling | Sir John Randall | Erwin Schrödinger | Alec Stokes | James Watson | Maurice Wilkins | Herbert Wilson

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