Phillip Allen Sharp

Phillip Allen Sharp ( born June 6, 1944 in Falmouth, Kentucky) is an American molecular biologist and geneticist.

Sharp studied at Union College in Barbourville, Kentucky Mathematics and a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1969 from the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. As a post-doc at Caltech and he was in the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory with James D. Watson. 1974 brought him Salvador Luria to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was Professor of Biology (since 1999 Institute Professor ). At MIT, he was from 1985 to 1991 director of the Center for Cancer Research, 1991-1999 Head of the Biology Department and from 2000 to 2004 director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

In 1980 he received the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology, 1986, Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. Prize and the Gairdner Foundation International Award, the 1988 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize - and 1993 with Richard J. Roberts received the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine " for their identification of the discontinuous structure of some hereditary factors of cellular organisms ." This so-called mosaic genes contain intron portions not code for protein portions, but rather are removed during splicing of the primary transcript. This can be done in various ways, so that identical DNA fragments can encode various proteins.

He is co-founder of several biotech companies ( Biogen, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, stomach Biosciences).