Nobel Prize winner Sir Richard Roberts turns 80: Knights of the Gene Guild

2023-09-06 15:24:30

The fame of the Nobel laureate never fades, but few laureates have converted the value of the Nobel medal into such hard political currency as Sir Richard Roberts: Born in Britain, he is still active in science, and yet he is more concerned with it, with the powerful and before To proselytize audiences worldwide to propagate green genetic engineering as the royal road to feeding the world. A top scientific activist and political free spirit, if you will, in the overalls of a laboratory genius.

Joachim Müller-Jung

Editor in the feuilleton, responsible for the “Nature and Science” department.

Richards had trained as a chemist at the University of Sheffield before going to Harvard University and shortly thereafter being recruited by the American gene pioneer James Watson for the legendary Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. It took him only a few years as a basic researcher to push genetics into a completely new direction with the discovery of RNA splicing in the mid-1970s. With his work, he was able to show in experiments that the genes, especially in higher organisms, by no means contain rigid, continuous building instructions, but that very different gene products – proteins – can arise from one gene through the different cutting of the gene transcript: through “alternative splicing”. namely. For this discovery he received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1993 together with the intron discoverer Phillip Allen Sharp.

A year before that, he had moved from the academic world to the biotech industry as a basic researcher. The New England Labs on the east coast, where Richards became chief scientist, still earns its money primarily from the production of restriction enzymes – molecular cutting tools – which play an important role in laboratory research. He was knighted in 2008. Today he still works there, and as a basic researcher he is once again working on something that fascinates molecular biologists worldwide: the chemical imprinting of the genome of bacteria – including pathogenic ones such as the hospital germ Clostridium – through attachment of methyl groups. This methylation is likely to play a decisive role in the life cycles of many germs and is therefore being traded as a new pharmacological option.

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His work in genetic education has become even more important, at least socially more effective, than this research work. He regularly travels to Asia and Africa, and he also seeks to engage with groups critical of genetic engineering in order to achieve the widest possible approval and use of genetically modified crops. “Green genetic engineering is medicine,” he is convinced, especially in the Third World, where undernutrition and malnutrition are still a huge problem, not least because of population growth. This Wednesday, September 6th, Sir Roberts will be 80 years old.