Eventually, Nancy Hopkins and David Botstein convinced Sharp to rewrite his letter, allowing Berget to receive a professor invitation from Rice University.
[3][4] Berget stated that she had "made peace" with Sharp and is done with talking about "old issues", but admitted that if she could do that part of her life over again, she would have been a "lot more aggressive" in pushing for credit on her postdoctoral work.
A friend who had "made a call" to one of the schools to inquire found that Sharp's letter of recommendation was unimpressive, as he had only discussed her work prior to joining his lab and mentioned nothing about her involvement in the split gene discovery.
After Angelides was fired in 1995, he filed slander lawsuits against Berget and other inquiry members, which was only settled in 1999 after the NIH had an independent investigation confirm the validity of the guilty conclusion.
[10] While working in Phillip Sharp's lab in 1976, Berget started investigating RNA in the cellular cytoplasm and how they were connected to the structure of the genome of adenovirus.
[13] After establishing her own laboratory, Berget began work investigating the deeper features of RNA splicing and how introns and exons are processed and what biochemical mechanisms are involved.
Using uridine triphosphate marked with a radioisotope, her lab was able to produce multiple radioactive RNA substrates for study each week, along with using HeLa cells to obtain nuclear DNA extracts.
[17] Berget is a member of the advisory council for the Center for Scientific Review, which oversees 70% of the National Institute for Health's annual grant applications.