Walter Gilbert

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For other people named Walter Gilbert, see Walter Gilbert (disambiguation).
Walter Gilbert
Walter Gilbert in 2008
Born (1932-03-21) March 21, 1932 (age 92)
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Education
Known forDNA sequencing
Spouse
Celia Stone
​
(m. 1953)​
[3]
Children2[3]
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
InstitutionsHarvard University
ThesisOn generalised dispersion relations and meson-nucleon scattering (1958)
Doctoral advisorAbdus Salam
Doctoral students
Websitewww.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1980/gilbert-bio.html

Walter Gilbert (born March 21, 1932) is an American

Nobel laureate.[3][4][5]

Education and early life

Walter Gilbert was born in

Boston, Massachusetts, on March 21, 1932, into a Jewish family,[6] the son of Emma (Cohen), a child psychologist, and Richard V. Gilbert, an economist.[4][7]

When Gilbert was seven years old, the family moved to the

I.F. Stone and Wally met Stone's oldest daughter, Celia, when they were both 8. They later married at age 21.[8]

He was educated at the

PhD in physics supervised by the Nobel laureate Abdus Salam in 1957.[4][9]

Career and research

Gilbert returned to Harvard in 1956 and was appointed assistant professor of physics in 1959.[4] 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.[10] In 1964 he was promoted to associate professor of biophysics and promoted again in 1968 to professor of biochemistry.[4]

Gilbert is a co-founder of the biotech start-up companies

The Scripps Research Institute. Gilbert has served as the chairman of the Harvard Society of Fellows
.

In 1996, Gilbert and Stuart B. Levy founded Paratek Pharmaceuticals. Gilbert served as chairman until 2014.[15]

Gilbert was an early proponent of sequencing the

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.[14] In an opinion piece in Nature in 1991, he envisioned completion of the human genome sequence transforming biology into a field in which computer databases would be as essential as laboratory reagents[16]

Gilbert returned to Harvard in 1985.[17] Gilbert was an outspoken critic of David Baltimore in the handling of the scientific fraud accusations against Thereza Imanishi-Kari.[18] Gilbert also joined the early controversy over the cause of AIDS.[19] In 1962, Gilbert's PhD student in physics

Higgs Boson.[20]

With his PhD student Benno Müller-Hill, Gilbert was the first to purify the lac repressor,[21] just beating out Mark Ptashne for purifying the first gene regulatory protein.[22]

Together with Allan Maxam, Gilbert developed a new DNA sequencing method, Maxam–Gilbert sequencing,[23][24] using chemical methods developed by Andrei Mirzabekov. His approach to the first synthesis of insulin via recombinant DNA[25] lost out to Genentech's approach which used genes built up from the nucleotides rather than from natural sources. 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.[26]

Gilbert first proposed the existence of

origin of life,[28] based on a concept first proposed by Carl Woese
in 1967.

Awards and honors

Walter Gilbert portrait via the National Library of Medicine

In 1969, Gilbert was awarded Harvard's Ledlie Prize.

Gairdner Prize and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research.[4]

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 nucleotides in a nucleic acid.

Gilbert has also been honored by the

Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1987.[4][31][32]

In 2002, he received the

Chemical Heritage Foundation.[33][34]

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.[35][24]

Personal life

Gilbert married Celia Stone, the daughter of I. F. Stone, in 1953 and has two children.[3] 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.[17][36]

Purple Swirl by Wally Gilbert

See also

References

  1. PMID 6326095
    .
  2. ^ "Jack Greenblatt". academictree.org.
  3. ^ a b c d Walter Gilbert on Nobelprize.org Edit this at Wikidata, accessed 11 October 2020
  4. ^
    PMID 12744546
    .
  5. ^ Walter Gilbert's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  6. ^ JINFO. "Jewish Nobel Prize Winners in Chemistry". www.jinfo.org. Retrieved 2023-03-30.
  7. ^ "Home - the Chicago Literary Club" (PDF).
  8. ^ Saltzman, Jonathan (2018-03-31). "Five things you should know about Wally Gilbert". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 2018-04-01.
  9. OCLC 879396761
    .
  10. ^ Watson, James D. (2003). Genes, Girls and Gamow.
  11. ^ Stendahl, Max (May 31, 2018). "40 years later, Biogen's founders Get the Band Back Together". Boston Business Journal.
  12. ^ Davies, Kevin; White, Michael (1996). Breakthrough: The Race to Find the Breast Cancer Gene. Wiley. p. 199.
  13. ^ "MYRIAD: PIONEERING PREDICTIVE MEDICINE". University of Utah. April 25, 2018.
  14. ^
    PMID 11658922
    .
  15. ^ "Founders".
  16. S2CID 1173431
    .
  17. ^ a b Johnson, Carolyn Y. (March 13, 2015). "A physicist, biologist, Nobel laureate, CEO, and now, artist". The Boston Globe.
  18. ^ Kolata, Gina (June 25, 1996). "Inquiry lacking due process". The New York Times Books.
  19. PMID 7992043
    .
  20. ^ Close, Frank (2013). The Infinity Puzzle: The Personalities, Politics and Extraordinary Science Behind the Higgs Boson. Oxford University Press. pp. 146–147.
  21. PMID 16591435
    .
  22. PMID 16591470
    .
  23. PMID 6246368
    .
  24. ^
    PMID 265521
    .
  25. PMID 358198
    .
  26. ^ Hall, Stephen S. (1987). Invisible Frontiers: The Race to Synthesize a Human Gene. Atlantic Monthly Press.
  27. S2CID 4216649
    .
  28. S2CID 8026658
    .
  29. ISSN 0080-4606
    .
  30. ^ "Warren Triennial Prize". ecor.mgh.harvard.edu. Archived from the original on November 27, 2020. Retrieved 2021-10-05.
  31. ^ "Professor Walter Gilbert ForMemRS". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2015-09-22.
  32. ^ "Fellowship of the Royal Society 1660-2015". Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2015-10-15.
  33. ^ "Biotechnology Heritage Award". Science History Institute. 2016-05-31. Retrieved 22 March 2018.
  34. ^ "Paratek Pharmaceuticals Chairman and Co-Founder Dr. Walter Gilbert Receives Heritage Award at BIO 2002". PR NewsWire. 10 June 2002. Retrieved 5 February 2014.
  35. ^ "Citations for Chemical Breakthrough Awards 2017 Awardees". Division of the History of Chemistry. Retrieved 12 March 2018.
  36. ^ "Wally Gilbert "Worlds"". www.nyartbeat.com. Retrieved 2019-12-16.

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Walter Gilbert.
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