Walter Gilbert was born on March 21,1932 and is an American biochemist, physicist, molecular biology pioneer, and Nobel laureate.
21 Facts About Walter Gilbert
2.
Walter Gilbert was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 21,1932, into a Jewish family, the son of Emma, a child psychologist, and Richard V Gilbert, an economist.
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When Gilbert was seven years old, the family moved to the Washington DC area so his father could work under Harry Hopkins on the New Deal brain trust.
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Walter Gilbert 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.
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Walter Gilbert 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.
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Walter Gilbert returned to Harvard in 1956 and was appointed assistant professor of physics in 1959.
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Watson and Walter Gilbert ran their laboratory jointly through most of the 1960s, until Watson left for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
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Walter Gilbert is a co-founder of the biotech start-up companies Biogen, with Kenneth Murray, Phillip Sharp and Charles Weissman and Myriad Genetics with Dr Mark Skolnick and Kevin Kimberlin where he was the first chairman on their respective boards of directors.
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Walter Gilbert left his position at Harvard to run Biogen as CEO, but was later asked to resign by the company's board of directors.
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Walter Gilbert is a member of the Board of Scientific Governors at The Scripps Research Institute.
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Walter Gilbert has served as the chairman of the Harvard Society of Fellows.
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Walter Gilbert was an early proponent of sequencing the human genome.
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Walter Gilbert was an outspoken critic of David Baltimore in the handling of the scientific fraud accusations against Thereza Imanishi-Kari.
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Walter Gilbert joined the early controversy over the cause of AIDS.
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Walter Gilbert's effort was hampered by a temporary moratorium on recombinant DNA work in Cambridge, Massachusetts, forcing his group to move their work to an English biological weapons site.
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Walter Gilbert first proposed the existence of introns and exons and explained the evolution of introns in a seminal 1978 "News and Views" paper published in Nature.
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In 1986, Walter Gilbert proposed the RNA world hypothesis for the origin of life, based on a concept first proposed by Carl Woese in 1967.
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In 1979, Walter Gilbert was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University together with Frederick Sanger.
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Walter Gilbert was awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, shared with Frederick Sanger and Paul Berg.
20.
Walter Gilbert has been honored by the National Academy of Sciences ; Massachusetts General Hospital ; the New York Academy of Sciences;, the Academie des Sciences of France.
21.
Walter Gilbert was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1987.