Nancy Goldman Nossal

Nancy Ruth Goldman Nossal ( - September 28, 2006) was an American molecular biologist specialized in the study of DNA replication. She was chief of the laboratory of molecular and cellular biology at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases from 1992 to 2006.

Life Nossal was born to Dorothy Goldman in Fall River, Massachusetts and raised in Newton, Massachusetts and Syracuse, New York. She completed a bachelor's degree at Cornell University in 1958 and a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of Michigan in 1964. G. Robert Greenberg was her doctoral advisor. She joined the NIDDK laboratory of biochemical pharmacology then under the direction of Herbert Tabor. Nossal was a leader in the study of DNA replication. Nossal's work focused on DNA replication using simple T4 bacteriophage system in E. coli. By using this simple phage model, she elucidated biochemical and molecular mechanisms universally required for DNA synthesis.

She was married to physicist Ralph J. Nossal. They had three children. Nossal died of cancer on September 28, 2006, age 69, in her home in Bethesda, Maryland.