Walter Gilbert (born March 21, 1932) is an American biochemist, physicist, molecular biology pioneer, and Nobel laureate.
Education and early life
Walter Gilbert was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 21, 1932, into a Jews family,
When Gilbert was seven years old, the family moved to the Washington D.C. area so his father could work under Harry Hopkins on the New Deal brain trust. While living in Washington the family became friends with the family of I.F. Stone and Wally met Stone's oldest daughter, Celia, when they were both 8. They later married at age 21.
He was educated at the Sidwell Friends School, and attended Harvard University for undergraduate and graduate studies, earning a baccalaureate in chemistry and physics in 1953 and a master's degree in physics in 1954.[ He studied for his doctorate at the University of Cambridge, where he earned a PhD in physics supervised by the Nobel laureate Abdus Salam in 1957.]
Career and research
Gilbert returned to Harvard in 1956 and was appointed assistant professor of physics in 1959.[ Gilbert's wife Celia worked for James Watson, leading Gilbert to become interested in molecular biology. Watson and Gilbert ran their laboratory jointly through most of the 1960s, until Watson left for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.][
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Gilbert is a co-founder of the biotech start-up companies Biogen, with Kenneth Murray, Phillip Sharp and Charles Weissman
In 1996, Gilbert and Stuart B. Levy founded Paratek Pharmaceuticals. Gilbert served as chairman until 2014.
Gilbert was an early proponent of sequencing the human genome. At a March 1986 meeting in Santa Fe New Mexico he proclaimed "The total human sequence is the grail of human genetics". In 1987, he proposed starting a company called Genome Corporation to sequence the genome and sell access to the information.
Gilbert returned to Harvard in 1985.
With his PhD student Benno Müller-Hill, Gilbert was the first to purify the lac repressor,
Together with Allan Maxam, Gilbert developed a new DNA sequencing method, Maxam–Gilbert sequencing,
Gilbert first proposed the terms introns (intragenic regions) and exons (expressed regions) in reference to recently discovered phenomenon of splicing
Awards and honors
In 1969, Gilbert was awarded Harvard's Ledlie Prize.[ In 1972 he was named American Cancer Society Professor of Molecular Biology.][ In 1979, Gilbert was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University together with Frederick Sanger.][
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Gilbert was awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, shared with Frederick Sanger and Paul Berg. Gilbert and Sanger were recognized for their pioneering work in devising methods for determining the sequence of in a nucleic acid.
Gilbert has also been honored by the National Academy of Sciences (US Steel Foundation Award, 1968); Massachusetts General Hospital (Warren Triennial Prize, 1977);[ Gilbert was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1987.]
In 2002, he received the Biotechnology Heritage Award, from the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) and the Chemical Heritage Foundation.
Allan Maxam and Walter Gilbert's 1977 paper "A new method for sequencing DNA" was honored by a Citation for Chemical Breakthrough Award from the Division of History of Chemistry of the American Chemical Society for 2017. It was presented to the Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology, Harvard University.
Personal life
Gilbert married Celia Stone, the daughter of I. F. Stone, in 1953 and has two children.[ After retiring from Harvard in 2001, Gilbert has launched an artistic career to combine art and science. His art format is centered on digital photography.]
See also
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List of Jewish Nobel laureates
External links
