HERALD: What triggered your interest in genetics?
RICHARD ROBERTS: I was trained originally as an organic chemist but while doing my PhD in Chemistry, it made me think what I am going to do with this chemistry. I started reading a book ‘Thread of Life’ by John Kendrew which was about the origins of molecular biology. By the time I finished the book I knew I wanted to be a molecular biologist. I left chemistry moved to a lab for post-doctoral research at Harvard University and got involved in molecular biology and then moved in for my faculty position at the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory where I was working on bunch of enzymes called the restriction enzymes.
HERALD: Can you speak on your experience on working with the virus called as adenovirus?
ROBERTS: We started using the eastern map, a human virus called the adenovirus, a virus which everybody is pretty much infected by. It is a nice virus to work with in the lab so we decided to look for something called promoters. That’s where transcriptional genes began and in the process we got results which did not make sense based upon what we knew about bacteria and so following through on that we discovered split genes.
HERALD: What about your work on type II restriction enzymes?
ROBERTS: When I started working on them, there were 5 or 6 enzymes that were known and I made those in my lab because we wanted to use them and then we started to looking for more and everywhere we looked we found new ones. Of the first 100 restriction enzymes known, 70 were discovered in my laboratory.
HERALD: How has your research helped in the field of medicine?
ROBERTS: The discovery I made is a very basic one. It tells you how genes are laid out in higher organisms. Once we got the sequence of the human genome, if you didn’t know about split genes and splicing you would not have been able to interpret that sequence, so it played a key role in interpreting the sequences of higher organisms and we now know the mechanism of splicing the way that these genes get cut and splice also cause diseases when things go wrong. In 2016, the first clinical application came about so there is now a medicine in the market that corrects the defecting splicing in a particular disease, this is 40 years after the discovery there was a direct clinical application.
HERALD: You have successfully demonstrated how RNA can be divided into introns and exons, could you tells us something on this?
ROBERTS: It is better to think about it in terms of the gene, so you look at the DNA, make a complete copy into RNA, the bits of the DNA that make sense that is actually code for a little bit of protein which are called exons and then the piece of RNA in between not coding for anything gets spliced which is called introns, so that exons all get spliced together and the introns get thrown away but some of the introns we know actually code for things that have a separate function so they do things other than code for proteins.
