Walter Gilbert. Walter Gilbert (1932–) While growing up in Boston and Washington, D.C., Walter Gilbert often skipped school so he could spend more time in the library reading about science. He began his professional career as a physicist, researching esoteric subjects like elementary particles and quantum field theory. After getting to know James Watson in the late 1950s he became interested in molecular biology and biochemistry. Over the course of his career Gilbert made large contributions to our understanding of how DNA oversees the synthesis of proteins with the help of RNA. He shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1980, with Frederick Sanger and Paul Berg, for his contributions concerning the determination of the base sequences in nucleic acids (DNA and RNA). He also helped develop recombinant-DNA technologies, in which a gene that instructs an organism to produce a certain protein is inserted into bacteria; the bacteria can then be used to make that protein for drug use. In this way, scientists can engineer bacteria that produce large amounts of human insulin, which can be harvested for use by diabetes patients.