He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Phillip Allen Sharp for the discovery of introns in eukaryotic DNA and the mechanism of gene-splicing.
In 1972, he became chair of The Center for Cancer Research at MIT . The department he established included future Nobel Prize winners David Baltimore, Susumu Tonegawa, Phillip Allen Sharp and H . Robert Horvitz.
In accordance with the advice by Phillip Allen Sharp ( Nobel Prize in Medicine 1993 ), he moved into the field of single molecule biophysics under the advisory of Jean-Louis Viovy at Curie Institute ( Paris ).
Other schools in the county are Sharp Middle School, named for Phillip Allen Sharp, American geneticist and molecular biologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine ( 1993 ) and National Medal of Science ( 2004 ), located between Falmouth and Butler, Northern Elementary in Butler, and Southern Elementary in Falmouth.