Walter Gilbert · Science & Medicine
DNA Sequencing
1932, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
United States · Harvard University
Biogen1978Walter Gilbert is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — DNA Sequencing
Origins and early life
Walter Gilbert was born in Boston on 21 March 1932 into a Jewish family, the son of Emma Cohen, a child psychologist, and Richard Gilbert, an economist who moved the family to Washington when the boy was seven to work on Roosevelt's New Deal.
Work and career
Gilbert trained as a physicist and was appointed assistant professor of physics at Harvard in 1959. What turned him was his wife Celia, who worked for James Watson; through her he found molecular biology, and for most of the 1960s he and Watson ran a laboratory together. His own contribution was to make DNA readable. With Allan Maxam he devised a way of cutting labelled DNA chemically at each of its four bases and sorting the fragments by length, so that the sequence could simply be read off a gel — one of the two methods that opened genomes to inspection.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980, shared with Frederick Sanger and Paul Berg, having taken the Horwitz Prize, the Gairdner and the Lasker the year before. He was a founder of Biogen. He married Celia Stone, daughter of the journalist I. F. Stone, in 1953, and since retiring from Harvard in 2001 has worked as a photographer.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Nobel Prize Chemistry 1980
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DNA Sequencing
Source: Nobel Prize Chemistry 1980
