Profiles in Science now features the papers of Daniel Nathans (1928-1999), who was was an American molecular biologist. Nathans studied chemistry, philosophy, and literature at the University of Delaware and earned his MD from Washington University in St. Louis. Before his medical residency at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, he was a Clinical Associate at the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health.

His pioneering work with restriction enzymes provided one of the cornerstones of "the new genetics." His early research advanced scientific understanding of protein synthesis in bacterial viruses. Later, working with tumor viruses, he was the first to demonstrate how recently-discovered restriction enzymes - which recognized specific DNA sequences and cut DNA at those points - could be used to analyze and map a viral genome. Restriction enzymes rapidly became essential tools of molecular biology, enabling much faster gene sequencing and mapping, as well as recombinant DNA technology. Nathans received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this work.