What is Phillip Allen Sharp known for?
Q: What is Phillip Allen Sharp known for?
A: Phillip Allen Sharp is an American geneticist and molecular biologist who co-discovered gene splicing, and shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Richard Roberts for "the discovery that genes in eukaryotes are not contiguous strings but contain introns, and that the splicing of pre-messenger RNA to delete those introns can occur in different ways, yielding different proteins from the same DNA sequence".
Q: Where was Phillip Allen Sharp born?
A: Phillip Allen Sharp was born in Falmouth, Kentucky.
Q: When did he complete his PhD?
A: He completed his PhD in chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1969.
Q: What research did he do after completing his PhD?
A: After completing his PhD 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 Watson.
Q: How did he end up at MIT?
A: In 1974 he was offered a position at MIT by biologist Salvador Luria.
Q: What positions has Philip held at MIT?
A: 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.
