Gilbert, Walter (1932-…), an American molecular biologist, shared the 1980 Nobel Prize for chemistry with Frederick Sanger of the United Kingdom (UK) for their contribution to the determination of base sequences in the nucleic acids DNA and RNA. See DNA ; RNA ; Sanger, Frederick .
Gilbert discovered a method of determining the precise sequence of nucleotides, the principal constituents of nucleic acids which determine the structure of the genes. Paul Berg also shared the Nobel Prize in 1980 for a separate field of study (see Berg, Paul ).
Gilbert was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He studied at Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1953 and a master’s degree in 1954. In 1957, he received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Cambridge University in the UK. Later that year, he joined the faculty at Harvard, where he has held a number of academic positions.
