Walter Gilbert biography

Profile

In the 1970s, Walter Gilbert developed a technique of using gel electrophoresis to read the nucleotide sequences of DNA segments. In 1979, he co-founded Biogen, a commercial genetic-engineering research corporation. Gilbert resigned from Biogen in 1985 and became a chief proponent of the Human Genome Project, a government-funded effort to compile a complete map of the gene sequences in human DNA.