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| Walter Gilbert, provided to Wikimedia by the Science History Institute as part of a cooperation project. |
I like to collect examples of successful scientists who straddled physics and biology. One example is Walter Gilbert. Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology doesn’t discuss Gilbert or cite his work, mainly because the textbook does not focus on molecular biophysics. But he is just the sort of broadly trained scientist with one foot in physics and one in biology that IPMB tries to promote.
Here is what Horace Freeland Judson said about Gilbert in the Eighth Day of Creation: The Makers of the Revolution in Biology, after interviewing him extensively.
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| The Eighth Day of Creation, by Horace Freeland Judson. |
By far the most important part of [James] Watson’s work on the messenger [mRNA] though, was his recruitment of Walter Gilbert to molecular biology. Gilbert was a theoretical physicist at Harvard when, in the summer of 1960, Watson stopped by the physics department to visit him. “He said, ‘There’s something very nice going on in the lab; whyn’t you come look at it?’ so I came around and looked at it and I joined the experiment,” Gilbert said. “Jim and I and Francois Gros did all the experiments together—just ran them continuously day and night; it was a very exciting period…”
“The experiments we did at that time were, conceptually, terribly trivial,” Gilbert said after a few minutes. “To take a radioactive compound that’s going to be a precursor of RNA—uracil, radioactive phosphate. Feed it to bacteria and look for an RNA species which is made quickly and broken down again… The major problem really was that when you’re doing experiments in a domain that you do not understand at all, you have no guidance to what the experiment should even look like.”Judson then discusses with Gilbert about his view of how the scientific community responded to their work on mRNA.
“There were large elements in the community who did not believe in the hypothesis at all—that is, that there was an intermediate that was not the ribosomal RNA,” Gilbert said. “The original experiments have an element of interpretation in them. They didn’t actually prove the hypothesis as the hypothesis was stated. One couldn’t do what one can do now, take a known piece of RNA and make a known protein with it. One couldn’t do that then.”Gilbert’s work on messenger RNA was only one of his contributions. He was an early proponent of the human genome project and developed one of the first automatic DNA sequencers. He also helped establish the biotech industry, cofounding Biogen. In 1980 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his “contributions concerning the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids.”
In his Nobel Prize biography, Gilbert tells of his early interest in science.
I always had an interest in science, in those years minerology and astronomy (I was a member of a minerological society and an astronomical society as a child). I became interested in inorganic chemistry at high school. In my last year in high school, 1949, I was fascinated by nuclear physics and would skip school for long periods to go down to the Library of Congress to read about Van de Graaf generators and simple atom smashers. I went to Harvard and majored in chemistry and physics. I became interested in theoretical physics and, as a graduate student, worked in the theory of elementary particles, the quantum theory of fields. I spent my first graduate year at Harvard, then went to the University of Cambridge for two years, where I received my doctorate degree in 1957. My thesis supervisor was Abdus Salam; I worked on dispersion relations for elementary particle scattering: an effort to use a notion of causality, formulated as a mathematical property of analyticity of the scattering amplitude, to predict some aspects of the interaction of elementary particles. I met Jim Watson during this period. I returned to Harvard and, after a postdoctoral year and a year as Julian Schwinger’s assistant, became an assistant professor of Physics. During the late fifties and early sixties, I taught a wide range of courses in theoretical physics and worked with graduate students on problems in theory. However, after a few years my interests shifted from the mathematical formulations of theoretical physics to an experimental field.
Gilbert’s success suggests one path from physics to biology: find a good collaborator who can steer you toward important topics. Then, use your tools from physics to help you solve key biological problems. It may not be the only path (it wasn’t mine), but it is the path that led to Walter Gilbert’s Nobel Prize.
Scientist Stories: Walter Gilbert, Reminisces of Genomics
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