Phillip Allen Sharp

This article is about the American geneticist. For other people, see Philip Sharp.

Phillip Sharp
With Winthrop-Sears Medal, 2007
Born	Phillip Allen Sharp (1944-06-06) June 6, 1944 Falmouth, Kentucky
Nationality	American
Fields	Biologist
Institutions	Caltech Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory MIT
Alma mater	Union College University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
Doctoral students	Connie Cepko Andrew Fire
Notable awards	NAS Award in Molecular Biology (1980) Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (1988) Dickson Prize (1991) Nobel Prize (1993) National Medal of Science (2004)
Spouse	Ann Holcombe
Website web.mit.edu/sharplab

External video
Meet Phillip Sharp: "What we were able to discover was that in human cells and in many other cells of higher-order organisms, the genes come in discontinuous segments", MIT

Phillip Allen Sharp (born June 6, 1944) is an American geneticist and molecular biologist who co-discovered RNA splicing. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Richard J. Roberts for "the discovery that genes in eukaryotes are not contiguous strings but contain introns, and that the splicing of messenger RNA to delete those introns can occur in different ways, yielding different proteins from the same DNA sequence". He has been selected to receive the 2015 Othmer Gold Medal.

Research

Sharp's current research focuses on small RNAs and other types of non-coding RNAs. His laboratory works to identify the target mRNAs of microRNAs (miRNAs), and has discovered a class of miRNAs that are produced from sequences adjacent to transcription start sites. His laboratory also studies how miRNA gene regulation functions in angiogenesis and cellular stress.

Biography

Sharp was born in Falmouth, Kentucky, the son of Kathrin (Colvin) and Joseph Walter Sharp. Sharp married Ann Holcombe in 1964. They have three daughters.

Sharp studied at Union College and majored in chemistry and mathematics, afterwards completing his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1969. Following his Ph.D., he did his postdoctoral training at the California Institute of Technology until 1971, where he studied plasmids. Later, he studied gene expression in human cells at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as a senior scientist under James Dewey Watson.

In 1974, he was offered a position at MIT by biologist Salvador Luria. He was director of MIT's Center for Cancer Research (now the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research) from 1985 to 1991; head of the Biology department from 1991 to 1999; and director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research from 2000 to 2004. He is currently a professor of Biology and member of the Koch Institute, and has been an Institute Professor since 1999. Sharp co-founded Biogen (formerly part of Biogen Idec), Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, and Magen Biosciences, and has served on the boards of all three companies.

Awards and honors

Phillip Sharp with George W. Bush, at the National Medal of Science awards in 2006.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Sharp has won several notable awards, including the 2004 National Medal of Science, the 1999 Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Sciences of the American Philosophical Society, and the 1988 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University together with Thomas R. Cech.

Sharp is an elected member of several academic societies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2011. In 2012, he was elected the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Pendleton County, Kentucky — Sharp's birthplace — named its current middle school after him.

Other activities

In Oct 2010 Sharp participated in the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Lunch with a Laureate program where middle and high school students got to engage in an informal conversation with a Nobel Prize-winning scientist over a brown-bag lunch. Sharp is also a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Advisory Board. In 2011, he was listed at #5 on the MIT150 list of the top 150 innovators and ideas from MIT.

He is an editorial advisor to Xconomy, and is a member of the Board of Scientific Governors at The Scripps Research Institute. He has also served on the Faculty Advisory Board of the MIT-Harvard Research Journal and MIT Student Research Association.

See also

• History of RNA biology
• List of RNA biologists
• MIT Department of Biology