Phillip Allen Sharp

Phillip Allen Sharp (born June 6, 1944) is an American geneticist and molecular biologist who co-discovered gene splicing. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Richard J. Roberts for "the discovery that genes in eukaryotes are not contiguous strings but contain introns, and that the splicing of messenger RNA to delete those introns can occur in different ways, yielding different proteins from the same DNA sequence".

Sharp was born in Falmouth, Kentucky. He studied at Union College and majored in chemistry and mathematics. He completed his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1969. After completing his Ph.D., he worked at the California Institute of Technology until 1971, where he studied plasmids and, later, gene expression in human cells at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory under James Dewey Watson.

In 1974, he was offered a position at MIT by biologist Salvador Luria. He was director of MIT's Center for Cancer Research (now the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research) from 1985 to 1991; head of the Biology department from 1991 to 1999; and director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research from 2000 to 2004. He is currently a professor of Biology and has been an Institute Professor since 1999; he is also a member of the Koch Institute. Sharp co-founded Biogen (now part of Biogen Idec), Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, and Magen Biosciences, and serves on the boards of all three companies. He is an editorial advisor to Xconomy.

In 1988 he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University together with Thomas R. Cech.

Sharp married Ann Holcombe in 1964. They have three daughters.

Selected publications






































Reference and external links

 * Autobiography at the Nobel site
 * Sharp's Research at MIT
 * The Phil Sharp Lab
 * The Official Site of Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize

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