Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 12, 1993 TAG: 9310120164
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: CAMBRIDGE, MASS. LENGTH: Medium
On Monday, Phillip A. Sharp and Richard J. Roberts won their own.
The Massachusetts-based scientists were named co-recipients of the Nobel Prize in medicine and will share an $825,000 prize.
"It felt good this morning, folks," Sharp said at a news conference hours after his wake-up call from the Nobel committee in Stockholm, Sweden, informing him of the award.
"Everybody doing science wants to feel they are going to make a discovery that everybody will look up to," Roberts said at a separate news conference. "But I think there's a different kind of satisfaction that comes when you realize that all of your colleagues also think it was a great discovery."
Sharp, 49, a native of Falmouth, Ky., heads the biology department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Roberts, 50, a native of Derby, England, works at New England Biolabs in Beverly, Mass. The two knew of each other's work, but weren't collaborating when they made their discoveries.
Their work changed scientists' understanding about DNA makeup and helped launch the field of biotechnology.
Genes, the building blocks of hereditary material, had been thought to be unbroken segments along strands of DNA. Roberts and Sharp discovered that individual genes can also be discontinuous - spread over several, separated segments.
"Everybody thought that genes were laid out in exactly the same way, and so it came as a tremendous surprise at the time," Roberts said in an interview.
Thomas Cech of the University of Colorado and Sidney Altman of Yale both said that Sharp's and Roberts' discoveries provided a foundation for their own work, which showed that the substance RNA could be a catalyst for chemical reactions in a cell.
They won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1989.
by CNB