In brief
Walter Gilbert (born March 21, 1932) is an American biochemist, physicist, and molecular biology pioneer who shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing methods to determine the base sequence in nucleic acids.
Walter Gilbert was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 21, 1932, into a Jewish family, the son of Emma (Cohen), a child psychologist, and Richard V.
Gilbert earned his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University in 1957 and initially pursued theoretical physics before transitioning to biochemistry and molecular biology in the 1960s. At Harvard, where he became a professor, he contributed to understanding gene regulation and control mechanisms, including early work on the lac operon and RNA polymerase. His breakthrough came in 1977 with the Maxam-Gilbert chemical sequencing method, which enabled rapid determination of DNA nucleotide sequences by labeling ends with radioactive markers and cleaving at specific bases, revolutionizing genomics.
Photographs
Hero photograph: Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons
