Phillip Allen Sharp

Phillip Allen Sharp is an American geneticist and molecular biologist who co-discovered RNA splicing. Born in Falmouth, Kentucky, in 1944, he studied chemistry and mathematics, took his doctorate in chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and trained at the California Institute of Technology and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. In 1974 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he directed its Center for Cancer Research, headed the biology department and founded the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and he is now Institute Professor. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Richard J. Roberts for showing that genes contain introns that can be spliced in different ways.