A Life in Science - Innovation Seminar Series

Sir Richard Roberts

Dr. Roberts was educated in chemistry at Sheffield University and molecular biology at Harvard University. He worked for 20 years at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York where his group discovered RNA splicing. In 1993, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Phil Sharp on their discovery of “split genes”, which completely changed scientists’ view of what constituted a gene and the degree of complexity in which information is encoded in DNA. He is currently Chief Scientific Officer at New England Biolabs, a company he helped start in the mid-1970’s and is now a leading provider of restriction enzymes and other research tools for academic and industry researchers worldwide. He has also had a long-standing interest in bioinformatics, which most recently had been applied to his research on restriction enzymes.