Phillip Allen Sharp

This article is about the American geneticist. For other people, see Philip Sharp.

Phillip Allen Sharp
Phillip Sharp with George W. Bush, at the National Medal of Science awards in 2006.
Born	June 6, 1944 (1944-06-06) Falmouth, Kentucky
Nationality	American
Fields	Biologist
Institutions	Caltech Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory MIT
Alma mater	Union College University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Doctoral students	Andrew Fire
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1993), National Medal of Science (2004)
Spouse	Ann Holcombe

Phillip Allen Sharp (born June 6, 1944) is an American geneticist and molecular biologist who co-discovered RNA splicing. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Richard J. Roberts for "the discovery that genes in eukaryotes are not contiguous strings but contain introns, and that the splicing of messenger RNA to delete those introns can occur in different ways, yielding different proteins from the same DNA sequence".

Sharp was born in Falmouth, Kentucky. He studied at Union College and majored in chemistry and mathematics. He completed his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1969. After completing his Ph.D., he worked at the California Institute of Technology until 1971, where he studied plasmids and, later, gene expression in human cells at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory under James Dewey Watson.

In 1974, he was offered a position at MIT by biologist Salvador Luria. He was director of MIT's Center for Cancer Research (now the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research) from 1985 to 1991; head of the Biology department from 1991 to 1999; and director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research from 2000 to 2004. He is currently a professor of Biology and has been an Institute Professor since 1999; he is also a member of the Koch Institute. Sharp co-founded Biogen (now part of Biogen Idec), Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, and Magen Biosciences, and serves on the boards of all three companies. He is an editorial advisor to Xconomy, and is a member of the Board of Scientific Governors at The Scripps Research Institute.

In 1988 he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University together with Thomas R. Cech. And in 1999 he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Sciences of the American Philosophical Society.

Sharp married Ann Holcombe in 1964. They have three daughters.

Pendleton County, Kentucky — Sharp's birthplace — named its current middle school after him.

In Oct 2010 Sharp will be participating in the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Lunch with a Laureate program where middle and high school students will get to engage in an informal conversation with a Nobel Prize winning Scientist over a brown bag lunch. Sharp is also a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Advisory Board. In 2011, he was listed at #5 on the MIT150 list of the top 150 innovators and ideas from MIT. Sharp has served on the Faculty Advisory Board of the MIT Harvard Research Journal and MIT Student Research Association.

Selected publications

• Petersen C.P., Bordeleau M.E., Pelletier J., Sharp P.A. (17 February 2006). "Short RNAs Repress Translation after Initiation in Mammalian Cells". Mol Cell. 21 (4): 533–42. doi:10.1016/j.molcel.2006.01.031. PMID 16483934. 

• Cheng C., Sharp P.A. (January 2006). "Regulation of CD44 Alternative Splicing by SRm160 and its Potential Role in Tumor Cell Invasion". Mol Cell Biol. 26 (1): 362–70. doi:10.1128/MCB.26.1.362-370.2006. PMC 1317625. PMID 16354706. http://mcb.asm.org/cgi/content/full/26/1/362?view=long&pmid=16354706. 

• Tantin D., Schild-Poulter C., Wang V., Hache R.J., Sharp P.A. (1 December 2005). "The Octamer Binding Transcription Factor Oct-1 is a Stress Sensor". Cancer Res. 65 (23): 10750–8. doi:10.1158/0008-5472.CAN-05-2399. PMID 16322220. 

• Grishok A., Sharp P.A. (29 November 2005). "Negative Regulation of Nuclear Divisions in Caenorhabditis Elegans by Retinoblastoma and RNA Interference-related Genes". Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 102 (48): 17360–5. doi:10.1073/pnas.0508989102. PMC 1297700. PMID 16287966. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=1297700. 

• Sharp P.A. (7 October 2005). "1918 Flu and Responsible Science". Science 310 (5745): 17. doi:10.1126/science.310.5745.17. PMID 16210500. 

• Miskevich F., Doench J.G., Townsend M.T., Sharp P.A., Constantine-Paton M. (15 April 2006). "RNA Interference of Xenopus NMDAR NR1 in vitro and in vivo". J Neurosci Methods 152 (1-2): 65–73. doi:10.1016/j.jneumeth.2005.08.010. PMID 16182372. 

• Hong J.H., Hwang E.S., McManus M.T., Amsterdam A., Tian Y., Kalmukova R., Mueller E., Benjamin T., Spiegelman B.M., Sharp P.A., Hopkins N., Yaffe M.B. (12 August 2005). "TAZ, a Transcriptional Modulator of Mesenchymal Stem Cell Differentiation". Science 309 (5737): 1074–8. doi:10.1126/science.1110955. PMID 16099986. 

• Houbaviy H.B., Dennis L., Jaenisch R., Sharp P.A. (August 2005). "Characterization of a Highly Variable Eutherian microRNA Gene". RNA 11 (8): 1245–57. doi:10.1261/rna.2890305. PMC 1370808. PMID 15987809. http://www.rnajournal.org/cgi/content/full/11/8/1245. 

• Sharp P.A. (June 2005). "The Discovery of Split Genes and RNA Splicing". Trends Biochem Sci. 30 (6): 279–81. doi:10.1016/j.tibs.2005.04.002. PMID 15950867. 

• Johnson D.M., Yamaji S., Tennant J., Srai S.K., Sharp P.A. (28 March 2005). "Regulation of Divalent Metal Transporter Expression in Human Intestinal Epithelial Cells Following Exposure to Non-haem Iron". FEBS Lett. 579 (9): 1923–9. doi:10.1016/j.febslet.2005.02.035. PMID 15792797. 

• Neilson J.R., Sharp P.A. (April 2005). "Herpesviruses Throw a Curve Ball: New Insights into microRNA Biogenesis and Evolution". Nat Methods 2 (4): 252–4. doi:10.1038/nmeth0405-252. PMID 15782215. 

• Grishok A., Sinskey J.L., Sharp P.A. (15 March 2005). "Transcriptional Silencing of a Transgene by RNAi in the Soma of C. elegans". Genes Dev. 19 (6): 683–96. doi:10.1101/gad.1247705. PMC 1065722. PMID 15741313. http://www.genesdev.org/cgi/content/full/19/6/683. 

• Sharp P.A.; Sharp, P (1 January 2005). "Phillip Sharp Discusses RNAi, Nobel Prizes and Entrepreneurial Science". Drug Discov Today 10 (1): 7–10. doi:10.1016/S1359-6446(04)03329-X. PMID 15676292. 

• Lee K.B., Sharp P.A. (7 December 2004). "Transcription-dependent Polyubiquitination of RNA Polymerase II Requires Lysine 63 of Ubiquitin". Biochemistry 43 (48): 15223–9. doi:10.1021/bi048719x. PMID 15568815. 

• Mansfield J.H., Harfe B.D., Nissen R., Obenauer J., Srineel J., Chaudhuri A., Farzan-Kashani R., Zuker M., Pasquinelli A.E., Ruvkun G., Sharp P.A., Tabin C.J., McManus M.T. (October 2004). "MicroRNA-responsive 'Sensor' Transgenes Uncover Hox-like and Other Developmentally Regulated Patterns of Vertebrate MicroRNA Expression". Nat Genet. 36 (10): 1079–83. doi:10.1038/ng1421. PMID 15361871. 

• Fairbrother W.G., Holste D., Burge C.B., Sharp P.A. (September 2004). "Single Nucleotide Polymorphism-based Validation of Exonic Splicing Enhancers". PLoS Biol. 2 (9): E268. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0020268. PMC 514884. PMID 15340491. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=514884. 

• Novina C.D., Sharp P.A. (July 8, 2004). "The RNAi Revolution". Nature 430 (6996): 161–4. doi:10.1038/430161a. PMID 15241403. 

• Ventura A., Meissner A., Dillon C.P., McManus M., Sharp P.A., Van Parijs L., Jaenisch R., Jacks T. (July 13, 2004). "Cre-lox-regulated Conditional RNA Interference from Transgenes". Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 101 (28): 10380–5. doi:10.1073/pnas.0403954101. PMC 478580. PMID 15240889. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/101/28/10380. 

See also

• History of RNA biology
• List of RNA biologists
• MIT Biology Department

Reference and external links

• Autobiography at the Nobel site
• Sharp's Research at MIT
• The Phil Sharp Lab
• The Official Site of Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize