Prof. Philip Sharp, Nobel Laureate and member of American Academy of Sciences, visited BIOPIC on May 31st. After a brief introduction of the center, Prof. Sharp was given a lab tour by BIOPIC PIs.

 

Prof. Sharp said he was impressed by BIOPIC’s state-of-art facilities and he expected BIOPIC would make significant contributions in the next few years. “I hope more MIT professors will have chance to visit BIOPIC when they are in Beijing.”

 

Phillip Allen Sharp, born in 1944, is an American geneticist and molecular biologist who co-discovered RNA splicing. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Richard J. Roberts for "the discovery that genes in eukaryotes are not contiguous strings but contain introns, and that the splicing of messenger RNA to delete those introns can occur in different ways, yielding different proteins from the same DNA sequence".

 

Sharp studied at Union College and majored in chemistry and mathematics. He completed his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1969. Then 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 Dewey Watson.

 

In 1974, he was offered a position at MIT and 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. He is currently a professor of Biology and has been an Institute Professor since 1999; he is also a member of the Koch Institute. Sharp co-founded Biogen (now part of Biogen Idec), Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, and Magen Biosciences, and serves on the boards of all three companies.

 

In 1988 he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University together with Thomas R. Cech. And in 1999 he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Sciences of the American Philosophical Society.

 

In 2011, he was listed at #5 on the MIT150 list of the top 150 innovators and ideas from MIT.