Richard J. Roberts

Sir Richard John Roberts is a British biochemist and molecular biologist, born in Derby in 1943. He studied chemistry at the University of Sheffield, took his doctorate there in 1969 and did postdoctoral research at Harvard University before moving to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where James Watson hired him. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Phillip Allen Sharp for the discovery of introns in eukaryotic DNA and the mechanism of gene splicing, which showed that genes can be cut and rejoined in different ways. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization, and he now works at New England Biolabs.