Skip to content
Nobel Jews
Portrait of Walter Gilbert
Photo: Douglas A. Lockard, Science History Institute, Douglas A. Lockard · CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Nobel Prize in Chemistry · 1980

Walter Gilbert

He found a chemical way to read DNA letter by letter, turning genes into text that doctors and scientists could study.

The Nobel citation: “for their contributions concerning the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids”
Born
March 21, 1932, Boston, MA, USA
Shared with
Paul Berg, Frederick Sanger
Affiliation at the time
Harvard University, Biological Laboratories, USA

Chemistry prize

1980

Shared with 2 other laureates.

Age that year

48years

Born in 1932.

Headline credited impact

$7.5–10billion in economic value

Cumulative global sales of genetically engineered non-antibody protein medicines (a proxy for economic activity). How it was built

Sources cited

25

Fact-checked September 24, 2026.

  • Gilbert trained as a theoretical physicist under Abdus Salam. A summer helping James Watson hunt for messenger RNA in 1960 pulled him into biology.
  • His method let a lab read hundreds of DNA letters in an afternoon. Before, working out a single letter might take a month.
  • He and Allan Maxam gave their sequencing recipe to other labs for free, even while they spent nine more months refining it.
  • In 1978 he coined the words "intron" and "exon" for the parts of a gene that are cut out and the parts that are kept.
  • His grandfather Joseph Cohen edited a Yiddish anarchist newspaper in New York, and his father-in-law was the journalist I.F. Stone.

The breakthrough

A chemical method for reading the sequence of DNA

DNA is a long chain written in four chemical letters, A, C, G and T. Their order spells out every gene, but in the early 1970s reading even a few dozen letters took Gilbert's lab years. A faster way grew out of two visits, the first in early 1975, and a lunch with the scientist Andrei Mirzabekov, who used a chemical that marks certain letters. Gilbert and his colleague Allan Maxam built a four-step recipe. First, they tagged one end of a DNA strand with a radioactive label. Then, in four separate tubes, they used chemicals that break the strand at particular letters, only rarely, so each strand is cut only about once. Picture a long necklace of four colors of beads with a tag on one end. If you snip each necklace at one random red bead and measure the tagged pieces, their lengths tell you exactly where the red beads sit. The scientists sorted the pieces by size on a gel and read the sequence off an X-ray film as a ladder of bands. Published in 1977, the method let a lab read hundreds of letters in an afternoon, where one letter had once taken as long as a month. Frederick Sanger developed a different method at the same time, and the two shared half of the 1980 prize.[3],[4],[6],[14],[17]

“We stopped being believers a couple of generations ago.”
Walter Gilbert, Telling the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about his family's relationship to religion after the 1980 prize was announced.[5]

What it meant for humanity

Before 1977, the order of letters in a gene was mostly guesswork. Gilbert's method, and Sanger's rival method, made it routine to read genes directly. Within months, Gilbert's student read the whole gene for the lac repressor protein and found that the published protein sequence had errors. Across biology, labs began reading genes from viruses, bacteria, mice and people. Sequencing helped map how the genes of animals are broken into pieces, and in 1978 Gilbert gave those pieces their names: exons, the parts kept, and introns, the parts cut out. Sequencing also made genetic engineering precise, because scientists could check exactly what they had built. In 1978 Gilbert's lab put a DNA copy of a rat insulin gene into bacteria and showed, by sequencing, that it was read correctly; the bacteria made a protein carrying proinsulin, the precursor of insulin. He co-founded the biotechnology company Biogen and led it in the early 1980s while it worked on interferons and a hepatitis B vaccine. Biogen later brought Avonex, an engineered protein for multiple sclerosis, to market. Gilbert was an early champion of reading the entire human genome and a founding officer of the Human Genome Organization in 1988. He co-founded Myriad Genetics, which with university and government partners helped identify genes behind inherited breast and ovarian cancer. Tests for such genes let people at high risk choose earlier screening or preventive surgery. His chemical method was later replaced by safer, automated methods, but it helped launch the age of reading DNA.

  • The Maxam-Gilbert method (1977) was one of the two first rapid ways to read DNA. It turned sequencing from nearly impossible into routine lab work and helped lay the base for modern genome sequencing.[6],[12],[17]
  • In 1978 his lab made bacteria produce a protein carrying rat proinsulin, the precursor of insulin, an early step toward making human medicines in microbes.[2],[7]
  • He co-founded Biogen in 1978 and led it as chief executive from 1981 to 1984, taking it public in 1983. Biogen later developed Avonex, an engineered interferon beta for multiple sclerosis approved in 1996.[10],[12],[13],[21]
  • An early advocate of sequencing the whole human genome, he was elected treasurer of the new Human Genome Organization in 1988.[15],[16],[18]
  • He co-founded Myriad Genetics, which with university and government partners helped identify genes behind hereditary breast and ovarian cancer; testing for such genes lets high-risk patients choose earlier screening or preventive surgery.[10],[14],[19]

Impact in numbers

Gilbert's biggest gift was making DNA readable. Together with Sanger's method, his chemistry turned sequencing from a years-long ordeal into a routine tool, opening the way to the study of gene structure, genetic diagnosis and, eventually, whole-genome sequencing. His ideas shaped how biologists think: he named introns and exons and argued that genes evolve by shuffling exons. He also showed that a top academic scientist could build a company, co-founding Biogen and Myriad Genetics and championing the Human Genome Project. The direct use of his own method later faded as Sanger's approach and automation took over, so this profile does not assign a separate number to sequencing, where his share could not be credibly separated. His one quantified claim is a small share of the recombinant-medicine industry his sequencing, gene-expression work and Biogen helped to build.

Fundamental scienceHealthTechnologyEconomy

Each number is the laureate’s credited share of a real-world outcome, cumulative to 2025. The whole outcome, the share of credit, and the reasoning are shown so you can check the arithmetic. Outcomes shared with other laureates are counted once on the impact page.

  • Low confidenceRippleModeledEconomy

    Cumulative global sales of genetically engineered non-antibody protein medicines (a proxy for economic activity)

    $7.5–10

    billion in economic value, credited share

    That is 0.5% of $1.5–2 trillion in economic value since 1982.

    How this number was built

    Same outcome and range as the Berg, Kornberg and Lederberg profiles: world sales of recombinant non-antibody protein drugs since Humulin (1982). 2013 antibody sales ~$75B were about half of biopharma, so non-antibody ~$75B (Ecker 2015); 2021 non-antibody originators $53.6B, biosimilars $11.1B (Walsh 2022). Low: quadratic ramp 1982-2013 ($0.81T) + fall to $53.6B in 2014-21 ($0.50T) + flat 2022-25 ($0.21T) = ~$1.5T. High: linear ramp ($1.2T) + same later years + half of biosimilars = ~$2.0T. Sales, not net benefit. Share 0.005 (~$7.5-10B): sequencing let engineers check constructs (his 1978 proinsulin clone was verified this way), and he co-founded and ran Biogen, maker of Avonex. But Sanger's method dominated sequencing, and Berg (0.05), Kornberg (0.02), Cohen, Boyer, Genentech and others did the rest.[7],[10],[17],[21],[22]

    Sources: mAbs (via PubMed Central); Nature Biotechnology (via PubMed Central); Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (via PubMed Central); Paratek Pharmaceuticals; The Eurasian Journal of Medicine (via PubMed Central)

The double edge

The most serious controversy near Gilbert's work involved Myriad Genetics, the company he co-founded and later served as vice-chairman. Myriad patented the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which raise the risk of breast and ovarian cancer, and for years was the only US lab allowed to test them, charging $3,000 to $4,000 per test. The ACLU filed suit in 2009, arguing the patents limited women's medical choices and slowed research. In 2013 the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously that naturally occurring DNA cannot be patented, and competitors soon offered the test for $1,000 to $2,300. No source we found shows Gilbert's personal role in the patent strategy. A smaller downside: his sequencing method relied on radioactive labels and toxic chemicals, one reason labs later abandoned it.

  • Moderate

    Myriad Genetics and the patents on breast-cancer genes

    Myriad, which Gilbert co-founded and served as vice-chairman, held patents that made it the sole US provider of BRCA1/2 testing at $3,000 to $4,000 per test. The ACLU argued the patents limited patients' options and hampered research. The Supreme Court struck down patents on natural DNA in 2013, after which rivals offered the test for $1,000 to $2,300.[10],[12],[19],[20]

  • Minor

    Hazardous chemistry

    The Maxam-Gilbert method used radioactive phosphorus and toxic reagents such as hydrazine and dimethyl sulfate. These hazards, and its trouble reading beyond about 500 letters, are among the reasons it is no longer used routinely.[3],[17]

Against the odds

Gilbert grew up in a professional family and faced no documented personal persecution, but his family story runs through the great Jewish migration. All four of his grandparents came from Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, in the 1890s. In the 1880s, anti-Jewish riots called pogroms had swept the empire's southern and western provinces. Between 1881 and 1924 more than 2.5 million Eastern European Jews moved to America, pushed out by persecution and poverty; most joined the working class and spoke Yiddish. His grandfather Joseph Cohen edited a Yiddish anarchist newspaper in New York. One generation later, Gilbert's father was a Harvard economist who joined the New Deal government in Washington. American life still had barriers. From the 1920s, Harvard and other elite colleges quietly limited Jewish admissions through interviews, legacy preferences and a push for geographic diversity. By the time Gilbert entered Harvard in 1949, open ethnic limits had become hard to defend after the Holocaust, though real gains in Jewish admissions came only in the 1960s. No source reports that Gilbert himself was held back.

  • —

    Persecution

    His grandparents left Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, in the 1890s, the decade after pogroms swept the empire's southern and western provinces. Sources do not say what made his own family leave.[5],[24],[25]

  • 1949

    Quota

    He entered Harvard in 1949, when elite colleges were still using indirect methods begun in the 1920s to limit Jewish admissions. No source says he was personally affected.[2],[23]

Jewish background

Both parents JewishCulturally Jewish

Gilbert was born in Boston into a Jewish family. His parents, the economist Richard Gilbert and the child psychologist Emma Cohen, were both born in Philadelphia, and all four of his grandparents came to the United States from Ukraine in the 1890s. His maternal grandfather, Joseph Cohen, edited a Yiddish anarchist newspaper in New York. In 1980 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported the prize as shared by two Jewish American scientists, Gilbert and Paul Berg. Gilbert told the agency he was enthusiastic about Israel but had never visited, belonged to no Jewish organizations, and that his family had stopped being religious believers generations earlier.[2],[5],[15],[16]

Key dates

  1. March 21, 1932

    Born in Boston to economist Richard Gilbert and child psychologist Emma Cohen.[1],[2]

  2. 1939

    Family moves to Washington, D.C., where his father joins the New Deal government.[2],[13]

  3. 1953

    Graduates from Harvard in chemistry and physics and marries Celia Stone, later a poet and artist.[14],[15]

  4. 1957

    Earns his doctorate at the University of Cambridge in theoretical particle physics, supervised by Abdus Salam.[2]

  5. 1959

    Becomes an assistant professor of physics at Harvard.[9],[14]

  6. 1960

    Joins James Watson's search for messenger RNA and switches to molecular biology.[2]

  7. 1966

    With Benno Müller-Hill, isolates the lac repressor, the first genetic control element ever isolated.[2],[3]

  8. February 1977

    Publishes the Maxam-Gilbert chemical method for sequencing DNA with Allan Maxam.[3],[6]

  9. 1978

    Coins the terms intron and exon, co-founds Biogen, and his lab gets bacteria to make rat proinsulin.[3],[7],[8],[10]

  10. 1979

    Wins the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (shared with Frederick Sanger and Roger Sperry) and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (shared with Sanger).[9]

  11. October 1980

    Awarded one quarter of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, shared with Frederick Sanger and Paul Berg.[1],[4]

  12. 1981

    Leaves his Harvard lab to run Biogen as chief executive; takes it public in 1983 and steps down in December 1984.[10],[11],[12],[15]

  13. 1988

    Elected treasurer of the newly founded Human Genome Organization.[18]

  14. 1992

    Co-founds the gene-testing company Myriad Genetics, later serving as its vice-chairman.[10],[12]

Sources

  1. 1.Walter Gilbert - Facts · NobelPrize.org (Nobel Prize Outreach)
  2. 2.Walter Gilbert - Biographical · NobelPrize.org (from Les Prix Nobel 1980), 1980
  3. 3.DNA Sequencing and Gene Structure (Nobel Lecture, 8 December 1980) · NobelPrize.org, 1980
  4. 4.The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1980 - Press release · The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences / NobelPrize.org, 1980
  5. 5.Two Jewish Scientists Share in Nobel Prize for Chemistry · Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 1980
  6. 6.A new method for sequencing DNA (Maxam AM, Gilbert W), PNAS 74(2):560-564 · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (via PubMed Central), 1977
  7. 7.A bacterial clone synthesizing proinsulin (Villa-Komaroff L, Efstratiadis A, ... Gilbert W), PNAS 75(8):3727-3731 · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (via PubMed Central), 1978
  8. 8.Why genes in pieces? (Gilbert W), Nature 271:501 · Nature, 1978
  9. 9.Walter Gilbert - Personal Collections · Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Library & Archives
  10. 10.Dr. Walter Gilbert (board biography) · Paratek Pharmaceuticals
  11. 11.Nobel Prize-winning chemist Walter Gilbert, founder of Biogen Inc., resigns as chairman · UPI Archives, 1984
  12. 12.Walter Gilbert (Honorary Board profile) · Society for Science
  13. 13.Five things you should know about Wally Gilbert · The Boston Globe, 2018
  14. 14.CV - Walter Gilbert · Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings Mediatheque
  15. 15.Walter Gilbert · Wikipedia
  16. 16.Walter Gilbert · Jewish Virtual Library
  17. 17.DNA Sequencing Methods: From Past to Present (Eren K, Taktakoglu N, Pirim I), Eurasian J Med 54(Suppl 1):S47-S56 · The Eurasian Journal of Medicine (via PubMed Central), 2022
  18. 18.Three decades of the Human Genome Organization (Lee C, Antonarakis SE, Hamosh A, Burn J), Am J Med Genet A · American Journal of Medical Genetics (via PubMed Central), 2021
  19. 19.Patenting Genes: What Does Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics Mean for Genetic Testing and Research? (Cartwright-Smith L), Public Health Reports 129(3):289-292 · Public Health Reports (via PubMed Central), 2014
  20. 20.Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics · American Civil Liberties Union
  21. 21.Biopharmaceutical benchmarks 2022 (Walsh G, Walsh E), Nature Biotechnology 40:1722-1760 · Nature Biotechnology (via PubMed Central), 2022
  22. 22.The therapeutic monoclonal antibody market (Ecker DM, Jones SD, Levine HL), mAbs 7(1):9-14 · mAbs (via PubMed Central), 2015
  23. 23.How the Ivy League's Jewish quotas shaped higher education (interview with Mark Oppenheimer by Susan H. Greenberg) · Inside Higher Ed, 2022
  24. 24.A Century of Immigration, 1820-1924 (From Haven to Home: 350 Years of Jewish Life in America) · Library of Congress
  25. 25.Pogroms (Holocaust Encyclopedia) · United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Fact-checked on September 24, 2026 by a separate AI fact-checking pass that re-opened the sources, with 7 corrections made. How we check

Suggest a correction