“Without discovery research, without innovation, applied research can only go so far,” says MIT Institute Professor Phillip Sharp. “There are strikingly important things we just don’t know exist, but discovering them through basic science changes the whole world.” That’s precisely what happened to Sharp. He came to MIT in 1974 to join the Center for Cancer Research, now the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, where he conducted discovery research on the molecular biology of gene expression. Three years later, he discovered RNA splicing, which changed scientists’ understanding of the structure of genes, and in 1993, he won the Nobel Prize.
