Walter Gilbert

Walter Gilbert ( born March 21, 1932 Boston, Massachusetts, United States) is an American physicist and biochemist. He is among the pioneers in the field of molecular biology. In 1980 he was awarded, together with Frederick Sanger and Paul Berg received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for methods for the determination of the base sequence in nucleic acids.

Life

He is the son of a child psychologist and an economist and graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in chemistry and physics in 1953 and the master's degree in physics in 1954. Afterwards he went to the University of Cambridge, in the case Abdus Salam he in 1957 theoretical physics was awarded his doctorate. Back in the USA he returned to Harvard, where he was Assistant Professor of Physics in 1959. In the early 1960s, he joined the research area, in 1964 associate professor of biophysics and in 1968 professor of biochemistry at Harvard. He was there in 1972 American Cancer Society Professor of Molecular Biology.

He is on the board of the Scripps Research Institute and chairman of the Harvard Society of Fellows.

In 1977 he developed with Allan Maxam A new method for sequencing DNA.

He was involved in the race for the first genetic production of insulin in which Genentech was but victorious.

Gilbert advocated the existence of introns and exons and resulted in 1978 in the names intron and exon. In 1986, he presented the hypothesis of the origin of life, RNA (RNA world hypothesis ), older ideas of Carl Woese (1967 ) below.

He was co-founder and first chairman of each of the biotechnology company Biogen and Myriad Genetics.

He was a member of the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV - AIDS Hypothesis, a group of scientists and scholars who provide the viral AIDS declaration in question (see also AIDS denial ), but has due to the success of antiviral therapy his opinion changed.

1968 Gilbert was awarded the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology, 1977 with the Prix Charles -Léopold Mayer, 1979, with the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and a Gairdner Foundation International Award, and also in 1979 with Louisa Gross Horvitz price ( with Frederick Sanger ). He received the Prix Charles- Leopold Mayer of the Academie des Sciences.

In 1987 he became a foreign member of the Royal Society. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, was awarded the Humboldt Research Award and was Guggenheim Fellow.