Philip Allen Sharp

He married Ann Holcombe in 1964. The couple is blessed three daughters. Ann works as a preschool teacher in Newtown, Massachusetts.

A middle school in his hometown, Pendleton County, Kentucky has been named after this Nobel Laureate molecular biologist.

Philip Allen Sharp was born on June 6, 1944, to Katherine and Joseph Sharp, in Falmouth, Kentucky.

He gained his early education from an array of public schools in Pendleton County. He started off by studying at McKinneysburg Elementary School. Later, he enrolled in Butler Elementary and High School, finishing off his higher education from Pendleton County High School.

On the insistence of his parents, he enrolled at the Union College, a liberal arts school in eastern Kentucky, majoring in chemistry and mathematics. Upon completing his graduation, he decided to study further and enrolled at the University of Illinois.

In 1969, he completed his PhD in chemistry from the University of Illinois. His thesis centred on the description of DNA as a polymer using statistical and physical theories.

While studying for his PhD, Philip Allen Sharp chanced upon reading the 1966 volume of ‘The Genetic Code’. The work propelled his interest in molecular biology and genetics. Resultantly, he did his postdoctoral training at the California Institute of Technology in a research program in molecular biology. He studied plasmids, how they acquired genomic sequences from the bacterial chromosome.

Following his end of term at Caltech, he extended his postdoctoral period, studying the structure and pathway of expression of genes in human cells. He later moved to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory where he furthered his postdoctoral studies under the guidance of Jim Watson. He worked there as a senior scientist.

At Cold Spring Laboratory, he collaborated with Joe Sambrook to map sequences in the simian virus 40 genome that were expressed as stable RNAs in both infected cells and oncogenic cells transformed by this virus using hybridization techniques. The result of the research was important as it assisted in the understanding of the biology of the papovavirus.

At Cold Spring Laboratory, he befriended Ulf Pettersson, who was an expert in the growth of human adenovirus. Together, the two discovered various unknown facts about adenovirus, beginning with the fact that only one specific fragment of the genome, the E1 region, was responsible for oncogenic transformation. They also found that restriction endonuclease length polymorphism could be utilized to generate genetic maps. They also found the mapping of specific genes on the viral genome; and generation of a viral map of sequences expressed as stable RNAs.

In 1974, biologist Salvador Luria offered Sharp a position at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined MIT's Center for Cancer Research, which is now known as the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

Philip Allen Sharp’s most extraordinary work came in the latter half of the 1970s. In 1977, he demonstrated how RNA can be divided up into introns (elements not needed for protein formation) and exons (elements needed for protein formation), after which the exons can be joined together. This can occur in different ways, giving a gene the potential to form a number of different proteins.