Phillip Sharp—Nobel Prize for Discovery of “Split Genes”

Abstract

American molecular biologist Phillip Allen Sharp received the 1993 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his discovery of “split genes.” He found that these genes are the most common type of gene structure in higher organisms, including humans. He shared the prize with Richard John Roberts (1943-), who discovered split genes independently of Sharp. The discovery of split genes has been of fundamental importance to basic research in biology as well as medical research on the development of cancer and other diseases. The discovery of split genes led to the prediction of the genetic process of splicing. Sharp was born on June 6, 1944, in Falmouth, Ky, on a small farm where his parents grew tobacco and corn. He attended Union College in Barbourville in southeastern Kentucky and received his BA degree in 1966. He subsequently enrolled at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and earned a PhD degree in chemistry in 1969. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena from 1969 to 1971. In 1971, Sharp became a member of the faculty of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in southeastern New York State, where he worked (from 1971 to 1972) with 1962 Nobel laureate James Watson (1928-). From 1972 to 1974, Sharp was a senior research investigator at the laboratory. Sharp left Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1974 to join the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, where his prize-winning research was performed. In the 1980s and the early 1990s, he was associate director and then director of the MIT Center for Cancer Research. In 1991, he was appointed head of the Department of Biology at MIT, and in 1992, he became the first Salvador E. Luria (1912-1991) Professor, a chair established at MIT to honor the 1969 Nobel laureate. In 1977, Sharp and his colleagues discovered that a single molecule of messenger RNA (mRNA) from an adenovirus corresponds to 4 separate discontinuous segments of DNA. (The segments of DNA that code for proteins [exons] are separated by long stretches of DNA [introns] that do not contain genetic information; the terms exon and intron were coined by Walter Gilbert [1932-], the 1980 Nobel laureate in chemistry.) Working independently of Sharp, Richard Roberts and his research team made the same discovery. Previously, biologists had believed that genes were continuous stretches of DNA that served as direct templates for mRNA in the assembly of proteins. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Sharp has received many honors and awards, including the Eli Lilly Award (1980), the Ricketts Award (1985), the Sloan Prize (1986), the Gairdner Foundation Award (1986), the Horwitz Prize (1988), the Lasker Award (1988), and the Dickson Prize (1990). He was honored on a stamp issued by the Palau Islands in 2000.