Walter Gilbert
Walter Gilbert (born March 21, 1932 in Boston , Massachusetts ) is an American physicist and biochemist . He is one of the pioneers in the field of molecular biology . In 1980, together with Frederick Sanger and Paul Berg, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for methods for determining the base sequence in nucleic acids .
Life
Walter Gilbert is the son of a child psychologist and an economist and studied at Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in chemistry and physics in 1953 and a master's degree in physics in 1954. He then went to the University of Cambridge , where he studied with Abdus in 1957 Salam received a PhD in theoretical physics. Back in the USA, he went back to Harvard, where he became assistant to Julian Schwinger and, in 1959, assistant professor of physics. In the early 1960s, he changed research areas, becoming an Associate Professor of Biophysics in 1964 and Professor of Biochemistry at Harvard in 1968. In 1972 he became American Cancer Society Professor of Molecular Biology there .
He is on the Board of Directors of the Scripps Research Institute and Chairman of the Harvard Society of Fellows . In 1977 he and Allan Maxam developed a new method for DNA sequencing . He was involved in the race to create the first genetically engineered insulin, but Genentech was victorious.
Gilbert propagated the existence of introns and exons and introduced the names intron and exon in 1978. In 1986 he proposed the hypothesis of the RNA origin of life ( RNA world hypothesis ), following older ideas from Carl Woese (1967). He was a co-founder and first chairman of the biotechnology companies Biogen and Myriad Genetics.
He was a member of the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV - Aids Hypothesis , a group of scientists who question the viral AIDS explanation (see also AIDS denial ), but has his due to the success of antiviral therapy Changed mind. He was also the first to clone the rat insulin cDNA. In 1978 he incorporated the rat insulin gene into the β-lactamase gene of the Escherichia coli bacterium and was able to produce insulin using genetic engineering.
In 1968 Gilbert received the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology , in 1977 with the Prix Charles-Léopold Mayer , in 1979 with the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and a Gairdner Foundation International Award and also in 1979 with the Louisa Gross Horvitz Prize (with Frederick Sanger). He received the Prix Charles-Leopold Mayer from the Académie des Sciences .
In 1987 he became an external member of the Royal Society . He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1968) and the National Academy of Sciences (since 1976), received the Humboldt Research Award and was a Guggenheim Fellow and Fellow of the American Physical Society (1998). In 2002 he received the Biotechnology Heritage Award .
Web links
- Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1980 award of Walter Gilbert (English)
- Michael Marshall: The secret of how life on earth began , on: BBC - Earth, October 31, 2016
Individual evidence
- ↑ Gilbert, Maxam A new method for sequencing DNA , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 74, 1977, 560-564.
- ↑ Why genes in pieces , Nature 271, 1978, p. 501.
- ↑ Origin of life: The RNA world , Nature 319, 1986, pp. 618-618.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Gilbert, Walter |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American physicist and biochemist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 21, 1932 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Boston , Massachusetts, USA |