Richard J. Roberts Biography

World of Chemistry on Richard J. Roberts

For decades scientists assumed that genes are continuous segments within deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) , the chemical template of heredity. In 1977, however, Richard. J. Roberts, a thirty-four year old British scientist working with adenovirus, the same virus that causes the common cold and pink eye, discovered that genes (the functional units of heredity) can be composed of several separate segments rather than of a single chain along the DNA strand. For his discovery of "split genes," Roberts was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1993.

Richard John Roberts was born on September 6, 1943, in Derby, England, a mid-sized industrial city about forty miles northeast of Birmingham. His father, John Roberts, was a motor mechanic, while his mother, Edna (Allsop) Roberts, took care of the family and served as Richard's first tutor. In 1947, the Roberts family moved to Bath, where Richard spent his formative years. At St. Stephen's junior school, Roberts encountered his first real mentor, the school's headmaster known only to the students as Mr. Broakes. Here he was exposed to a variety of mentally-stimulating games, ranging from crossword to logical puzzles. "Most importantly, I learned that logic and mathematics are fun!," Roberts wrote in a brief autobiography for the Nobel Foundation.

At the City of Bath Boys School (now Beechen Cliff School), Roberts became enamored with the life and literature of detectives, as they represented the ultimate puzzle solvers. His young career path changed abruptly, however, when he received a chemistry set from his parents. His ever supportive father had a large chemistry cabinet constructed and, with the aid of a local chemist who supplied the myriad chemicals he needed, Roberts soon discovered how to assemble fireworks and other concoctions not found in a beginner's chemistry manual. "Luckily I survived those years with no serious injuries or burns. I knew I had to be a chemist," he wrote in the Nobel Foundation autobiography.

At the age of seventeen, Roberts entered Sheffield University, where he concentrated in chemistry. His initial introduction to biochemistry was totally negative, he recalled in his autobiography: "I loathed it. The lectures merely required rote learning and the laboratory consisted of the most dull experiments imaginable." After graduating with honors in 1965, Roberts remained at Sheffield to study for his doctoral degree under David Ollis, his undergraduate professor of organic chemistry. But the direction of Roberts' scientific interests were profoundly altered after reading a book by John Kendrew on crystallography and molecular biology. Roberts became hooked on molecular biology and was later invited to conduct his postdoctoral work as part of a research team assembled by his colleague, Jack Strominger , a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Harvard University.

In 1969, Roberts left the English countryside and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he spent the next four years deciphering the sequence of nucleotides in a form of ribonucleic acid known as tRNA. Using a new method devised by English biochemist Frederick Sanger at Cambridge, he was able to sequence the RNA molecule, while teaching other scientists Sanger's technique. His creative work with tRNA led to the publication of two papers in Nature and an invitation by genetic pioneer and Nobel laureate, James Watson, to join his laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York.

In 1972, Roberts moved to Long Island to research ways to sequence DNA. American microbiologists Daniel Nathans and Hamilton Smith had shown that a restriction enzyme, Endonuclease R, could split DNA into specific segments. Roberts thought that such small segments could be used for DNA sequencing and began looking for other new restriction enzymes to expand the repertoire. (Enzymes are complex proteins that catalyze specific biochemical reactions.) He noted in his autobiography that his laboratory was responsible for discovering or characterizing three-quarters of the world's first restriction enzymes. In 1977, he developed a series of biological experiments to "map" the location of various genes in adenovirus and found that one end of a messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) did not react as expected. With the use of an electron microscope, Roberts and his colleagues observed that genes could be present in several, well-separated DNA segments. As he told the New York Times, "Everybody thought that genes were laid out in exactly the same way, and so it came as a tremendous surprise that they were different in higher organisms, such as humans."

In 1986, Roberts married his second wife, Jean. He is the father of four children, Alison, Andrew, Christopher and Amanda. He moved back to Massachusetts in 1992 to join New England Biolabs, a small, private company in Beverly, Massachusetts, involved in making research reagents, particularly restriction enzymes. He serves as joint research director. In 1993, Roberts was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of "split genes." The Nobel Committee stated that, "The discovery of split genes has been of fundamental importance for today's basic research in biology, as well as for more medically oriented research concerning the development of cancer and other diseases."