HARVARD PROFESSOR GETS NOBEL
WALTER GILBERT WORKED IN DNA

Author: By Dick Soderlund Associated Press

Date: Tuesday, October 14, 1980
Page: ?????
Section: RUN OF PAPER

The physics award was given for nuclear research that contributed to the big-bang theory of the creation of the universe. The chemistry prize went for biochemical studies of nucleic acids, the master blueprints of life.

James W. Cronin of the University of Chicago and Val L. Fitch of Princeton University won the physics prize.

Professor Paul Berg of Stanford University in California received one half of the $212,000 prize in chemistry. The other half went jointly to Professor Walter Gilbert of Harvard and Professor Frederick Sanger of Cambridge University.

Gilbert and Sanger were cited by the awarding body "for their contributions concerning the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids."

Gilbert, 48, told a reporter he was "delighted, pleased and honored" to receive the chemistry prize.

An American Cancer Society professor of molecular biology, he made headlines two years ago when he led a team that harnessed bacteria to manufacture insulin. The accomplishment, unprecedented at the time, opened the way for other microscopic engineering work to use bacteria to make valuable hormones.

Last January, Gilbert announced that recombinant DNA technology had been used again to produce interferon, a promising anti-viral drug.

Gilbert, 48, has also been at the forefront of finding practical applications for his basic research. He has worked on teams that have found ways to induce common bacteria to produce chemicals that are useful to humans.

"The thing that Frederick Sanger and I are most known for is methods to work out the structure of DNA that carries all the genetic information," he said in an interview. "These methods have meant that we can work out the structure of any gene in a very short time.

"That ability wouldn't mean anything to us if we didn't have the ability to obtain those genes, and that ability is dependent on recombinant DNA techniques. Those two techniques together - recombinant DNA technbiques allow us to isolate a gene and the rapid sequencing techniques enable us to work out a structure entirely - are the techniques that over the past few years underlie the tremendous burst of information in molecular biology."

Gilbert is the American Cancer Society professor of molecular biology at Harvard and has taught at the university since 1959.

Last January, Gilbert announced that recombinant DNA technology had been used again to produce interferon, a promising anti-viral drug.

Gilbert is chairman of Biogen S.A., a Swiss firm that oversaw the
interferon research.

Gilbert is the second Harvard geneticist to win the Nobel Prize this year. On Friday, Dr. Baruf Benacerraf won the prize in medicine for work on understanding the body's immunity system.

"I hope our work can be of use in medical research," Sanger said. "There are a lot of diseases that are probably due to mistakes in DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), genetic mistakes. These include sickle cell anemia."

Sanger, 62, who works at Cambridge University's Medical Research Council laboratory of Molecular Biology, said in a telephone interview that he won in 1958 for work in his specialty of chemical code-breaking.

"It is very exciting to have one's work recognized in this way," he said. "It is exciting to me and my colleagues who worked with me. . .I have only just heard about it."

He said the work that led to this year's award involved acid, the basic "alphabet" encoding DNA-deoxyribonucleic acid, the basic material in cell nucleus chromosomes which contains the genetic code.

"I hope our work can be of use in medical research," he said. "There are a lot of diseases that are probably due to mistakes in DNA, genetic mistakes. These include sickle cell anemia."

Sanger said that in both cases he devised techniques for reading the sequences with which these extremely complicated chemical structures are encoded-in the case of DNA in a basic sequence of four units.

"It's similar to a book. In a book, the information is encoded in the order of the letters of the alphabet. If you can read this information, you can understand the book.

"We have worked out a method for reading DNA. . .A rapid and simple method. It's like saying you can learn to read a book.

"Now there is a lot of research we can do, including what goes wrong in diseases.

"If we can understand what these (genetic) mistakes are we can try to do something about them."

He said his work involved "trying to understand the workings of normal living matter" so that research can be done on the abnormalities that occur.

He said he had to devise entirely new methods of determining the sequences in which DNA is encoded because it was "much harder to work on" than protein.

Berg, 54, is considered the father of the controversial branch of biochemistry known as genetic engineering. He was the first person to manufacture a human hormone from a virus combined with genes from a bacterial chromosome.

"His pioneering experiment has resulted in the development of a new technology, often called genetic engineering or gene manipulation,"the Academy of Science said in a statement.

This was Sanger's second Nobel Prize. He won in 1958 for his work in chemical code-breaking of proteins, the building blocks of living matter.

Seven of the nine Nobel prizes awarded so far have gone to Americans. Still to be announced is the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, a late addition to the original prizes set up in 1968 through a donation by the Central Bank of Sweden.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited New York-born Berg "for his fundamental studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids," the complex organic acids found in the nucleus of all cells and essential to life.

The Academy cited Cronin and Fitch "for the discovery of violations of fundamental symmetry principles in the decay of neutral K-mesons." Mesons are unstable particles first observed in cosmic rays. The big-bang theory is that the universe began with a gigantic explosion and has been expanding ever since.

Cronin and Fitch made their Nobel winning discovery in studies of a new type of elementary particles using a proton accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory on New York's Long Island, where they headed a research group. Their studies scrutinized the validity of three related symmetry principles in physics.

"The new truth reached by the discovery of violations of the laws of symmetry in nature recently also has been incorporated as an important ingredient in cosmological speculations. The aim has been to try to understand how a universe, originally very hot and symmetric, could avoid that matter and antimatter almost immediately annihilated each other. In other words, efforts have been made to describe how the matter we are made of was once created in a big bang and how it could survive the birth pains," the Academy of Sciences stated.

"The discovery emphasizes, once again, that even the most self-evident principles in science cannot be regarded fully valid until they have been examined in precise experiments," it added.

The academy described the work of Fitch and Cronin as pure basic research without direct practical applications but with great importance for the understanding of elementary matter and life on Earth.

The new knowledge offered by the prizewinners "permits us to make a distinction between matter and antimatter in an absolute and not only relative way. The left and right dimensions could then also be given absolute meaning, thus losing the arbitrariness of definition," the academy said.

Fitch, a professor of physics, told a reporter who called him at Princeton, "I am very pleased indeed, of course" by the award.

"Wow. I can't believe it. I am pleased, of course," commented Cronin when contacted in Chicago.

On Thursday, the literature prize went to poet-novelist Czeslaw Milosz, a naturalized American citizen who writes in Polish. On Friday, the medicine prize was shared by Baruj Benacerraf of Harvard, George D. Snell of the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine and Jean Dausset of France.

The American dominance of the Nobel prizes has been marked, especially in the physics and medicine categories, and increasing since 1975. In that six- year period 12 of the 16 laureates in physics were Americans.

Yesterday, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Adolfo Perez Esquivel of Argentina for his vocal opposition to human rights abuse in Argentina, where thousands of leftist guerrillas and dissidents have disappeared or gone to prison without being charged since a 1976 military takeover.

Gilbert, 47, is a molecular biologist and lives on Upland road, Cambridge.

Born in Boston, he graduated from Harvard with a bachelor of science degree in biology in 1953 and continued his studies at Harvard and at Cambridge University in England where he won his doctorate in 1957.

The independent genetic research by Gilbert and Sanger also won for them the Lasker Award for Medical Research last year.

Other scientists said "they discovered new techinques which made it possible to derive answers about the genetic code in a few days where previously it had taken years."

The new technique uses chemicals that slice long molecules of DNA, the string of genes in the nucleus of each cell, at specific sites. The technique is roughly a analogous to a computer programmed to insert a hyphen after every "a" in a long sentence to mark the letter's location whenever it occurs.

Gilbert is among scientists whose genetic research is expanding a new field of science which holds enormous promise for understanding some of the most elementary secrets of life.

In 1968, Gilbert won the US Steel Foundation award of the National Academy of Science for his genetic research.

Two years earlier, Gilbert, working with a collague, Dr. Benno Mueller- Hill, isolated a protein, called a "repressor" which shuts down the
machinery in one type of tiny, single-cell bacteria for digesting a sugar.

The "repressor" blocks the "reading" of information locked in one part of the genes-units of heredity- of bacteria, and enables the living cells to shut off parts of their machinery when they are not needed.

Biologists believe a similar "shut-down" happens when a single cell fertilized human egg develops into a baby. As the cells divide and divide again they "specialize" into brain, heart, arms, eyes and so as. As the cells specialize, needless functions are repressed.

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