September 4, 2003

Nobel Laureate to Visit Medical School

INDIANAPOLIS - When microbiologist Philip A. Sharp, Ph.D., discovered split genes in his laboratory nearly three decades ago, he opened up a revolutionary way of studying the role of genes in cancer and other diseases.

That discovery and further investigation would later earn Dr. Sharp, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Dr. Sharp will share his insights in a campus-wide lecture at the Indiana University School of Medicine, 1 p.m., Monday, Sept. 15, in the Ruth Lilly Auditorium at the Riley Outpatient Center. He is the guest of the graduate students of the School's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

His presentation is the "New Biology of RNA." RNA is ribonucleic acid, an essential component that carries genetic information in all living matter.

The landmark achievement of the Kentucky-born scientist, director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, was his discovery of RNA splicing in 1977. This work was one of the first indications of "discontinuous genes" in mammalian cells. This means that genes contain segments that are edited out by cells when genetic information is being transferred, providing an understanding of the genetic causes of cancer and other disorders.

That research opened up a new area in microbiology - and that work earned Dr. Sharp the Nobel Prize in 1993, which he shared with Richard Roberts, Ph.D., who conducted similar research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Massachusetts.

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