Richard Roberts

Richard Roberts independently discovered the split-gene structure of eukaryotic organisms while researching the genetics of adenoviruses. He demonstrated that genes consist of both coding sequences (exons) and non-coding sequences (introns), fundamentally changing the understanding of genetics.

Yes, Richard Roberts was jointly awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine alongside Phillip A. Sharp. They shared the prize for their independent discoveries that individual genes can be discontinuous, split into separate segments.

Roberts made his Nobel Prize-winning discovery in 1977 while working at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. He used the common cold virus (adenovirus) as his model organism to track how RNA was processed in the cell.

Prior to this discovery, scientists believed DNA genes were continuous strands that directly matched proteins. Roberts' discovery of RNA splicing—the process where non-coding regions are removed and coding regions are joined together—opened up entirely new fields of genetic research and biotechnology.