Walter Gilbert

Molecular biologist, born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He earned degrees in physics at Harvard and mathematics at Cambridge University, UK. In his long career at Harvard (1959), he taught successively physics, biophysics, biochemistry, and molecular biology, and was named Carl M Loeb university professor (1987). He identified the entire sequence of nucleotides in the DNA of a digestive protein produced by the E coli bacterium (1977). The technique he developed (with Allan Maxam) for rapidly sequencing genes was critical in launching the new field of genetic engineering, and earned him a share of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. In the 1980s he contributed to efforts to identify the basic components of proteins. In 1978 he founded Biogen, a genetic engineering firm and became chief executive officer (1981–4). He was a major force in launching the Human Genome Project in the late 1980s, designed to map all the genes on human chromosomes.

Walter Gilbert (born March 21, 1932) is an American physicist, biochemist, entrepreneur, and molecular biology pioneer.

He was born in Boston, Massachusetts and educated at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, later joining the faculty at Harvard.

Gilbert was awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Frederick Sanger. Gilbert and Sanger were recognized for their pioneering work in devising methods for determining the sequence of nucleotides in a nucleic acid. Walter Gilbert also first proposed the term RNA world hypothesis for the origin of life, for a concept first proposed by Carl Woese in 1967.

In the late 1980s, Walter Gilbert expressed skepticism about the role of HIV in AIDS;