Roberts, Richard J.

(born Sept. 6, 1943, Derby, Eng.) molecular biologist, the winner, with Phillip A. Sharp, of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his independent discovery of “split genes.”

Roberts received a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Sheffield, Eng., in 1968. After postdoctoral research at Harvard University, he took a post at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York in 1972.

In 1992 he joined New England Biolabs, a biotechnology firm.

In 1977 Roberts and a team including Thomas Broker, Louise Chow, and Richard Gelinas established that the genes of the adenovirus—one of the viruses that cause the common cold—are discontinuous: the segments of DNA that code for proteins are interrupted by lengthy stretches of DNA that do not contain genetic information. The coding segments are called exons; the noncoding ones are called introns. A research team working under Sharp at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology produced the same finding that same year. Previously, based on studies of bacterial DNA, biologists believed that genes consisted of unbroken stretches of DNA, all of which encoded protein structure. It has since been established that the discontinuous gene structure discovered by Roberts and Sharp is the most common structure found in higher organisms (eukaryotes). In addition to having important implications for the study of genetic diseases, this structure is believed to drive evolution by allowing information from different parts of the gene to be brought together in new combinations.