PROFILE IN THE NEWS
WALTER GILBERT: HARVARD'S ENTHUSIASTIC RESEARCHER

Author: - ROBERT COOKE

Date: Wednesday, October 15, 1980
Page: ?????
Section: RUN OF PAPER

And enthusiasm ran wild in Harvard's biology laboratory yesterday after Gilbert, 48, was named corecipient of the 1980 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work with the basic molecule of heredity, DNA.

Gilbert, after toasting friends and colleagues with a glass of bubbly, said that "I feel overjoyed and overwhelmed. I was totally startled. I hadn't taken my coat off yet this morning when the phone rang" and he was told of the award.

Gilbert shares half of the $212,000 award with English biologist Frederick Sanger, and the other half goes to Stanford University biologist Paul Berg.

All three winners have been deeply involved in research that has made new genetic manipulation techniques - referred to loosely as genetic engineering - possible. As a result, a new industry is being spawned and many small new companies are being formed to exploit the technology.

Gilbert, who is Harvard University's American Cancer Society professor of molecular biology, started his academic career, however, as a mathematician-p hysicist. He came to the Harvard faculty in 1958 as a lecturer in physics, specializing in study of subatomic particles.

"But in 1960," Gilbert said, "James Watson convinced me that there's much excitement in molecular biology," so he changed fields. In 1964 he was named associate professor of biophysics, later became professor of biochemistry and, finally, American Cancer Society professor in 1972.

He was named winner of the Nobel Prize for developing a relatively rapid method for "sequencing" the individual links in the DNA molecule. This technique allows scientists to define the total chemical structure of any gene.

Without the sequencing techniques worked out by Gilbert and Sanger, and without the gene-splicing techniques developed by Berg, none of the present exciting work toward genetic engineering would be possible.

"He is also respected as a good teacher," a colleague at Harvard said. "He tries new things all the time. He has been instructing a new course in immunology for the past few years. He's not an immunologist, but he likes new things."

Also, an acquaintance said, "when he talks before the public he's very good. He has a firm grasp of things, and he can make them very easy to understand."

"And when he gets excited about something, he can really work hard. He gets excited like a small kid about new things. He stays late at night, and he becomes really very exuberant when something good comes up."

The friend added that Gilbert also gets excited about good progress in other people's work, not just his own.

As the award indicates, Gilbert has been at the leading edge of such research work, and he was one of the founders of a new company - Biogen, S.A. - formed in Switzerland to exploit it. He announced last winter, on behalf of Biogen, that a way had been found to trick tiny bacteria into making human
interferon.

Gilbert and his colleagues at Harvard were also among the first to induce the bacteria - known as E. coli - to make mammalian insulin.

He has spent almost all of his career at Harvard. Both his undergraduate (physics and chemistry) degree and his master's (physics) degree were taken at Harvard, but he went to Cambridge University in England for his Ph.D. in mathematics.

It's evident, too, that Harvard sort of runs in Gilbert's family.

His father, Richard V. Gilbert, was professor of economics.

And his daughter, Kate, is at Harvard as an undergraduate in social studies, interested in anthropology.

His son, John, however, recently enrolled at the California Institute of Technology as a graduate student in physics.

Gilbert is a Boston native and is married to Celia Stone Gilbert. They live in Cambridge.

COOKE ;10/14,14:59 MFEENE;10/16,12 B07981795