Keynote address:  "Applications of Gene-Splicing Research"

Richard J. Roberts, Ph.D., was awarded the 1993 Nobel Laureate for his work in gene splicing.  In addition to serving as research director at New England Biolabs, Roberts is a fellow of both the Society of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Microbiology.

Dr. Roberts received a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Sheffield, England, in 1968.  After postdoctoral research at Harvard University, he took a post at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York in 1972.

In 1977 Roberts and a team including Thomas Broker, Louise Chow and Richard Gelinas established that the genes of the adenovirus—one of the viruses that cause the common cold—are discontinuous.  The segments of DNA that code for proteins are interrupted by lengthy stretches of DNA that do not contain genetic information.  A team from MIT headed by Phillip A. Sharp reported parallel findings the same year.

Based on studies of bacterial DNA, biologists had previously believed that genes consisted of unbroken stretches of DNA, all of which encoded protein structure.  It has since been established that the discontinuous gene structure discovered by Roberts and Sharp is the most common structure found in higher organisms (eukaryotes).  In addition to having important implications for the study of genetic diseases, this structure is believed to drive evolution by allowing information from different parts of the gene to be brought together in new combinations.

For this work, Drs. Roberts and Sharp were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.