Walter Gilbert (born March 21, 1932) is an American biochemist, physicist, molecular biology pioneer, and Nobel laureate.

[4][7] When Gilbert was seven years old, the family moved to the Washington D.C. area so his father could work under Harry Hopkins on the New Deal brain trust.

[4] He studied for his doctorate at the University of Cambridge, where he earned a PhD in physics supervised by the Nobel laureate Abdus Salam in 1957.

[4] Gilbert is a co-founder of the biotech start-up companies Biogen, with Kenneth Murray, Phillip Sharp and Charles Weissman[11] and Myriad Genetics with Dr. Mark Skolnick and Kevin Kimberlin[12][13] where he was the first chairman on their respective boards of directors.

Gilbert left his position at Harvard to run Biogen as CEO, but was later asked to resign by the company's board of directors.

[14] In an opinion piece in Nature in 1991, he envisioned completion of the human genome sequence transforming biology into a field in which computer databases would be as essential as laboratory reagents[16] Gilbert returned to Harvard in 1985.

[17] Gilbert was an outspoken critic of David Baltimore in the handling of the scientific fraud accusations against Thereza Imanishi-Kari.

[26] Gilbert first proposed the terms introns (intragenic regions) and exons (expressed regions) in reference to recently discovered phenomenon of splicing[27] and suggested explanation for the evolution of introns in a seminal 1978 "News and Views" correspondence to Nature titled "why genes in pieces?".

Gilbert and Sanger were recognized for their pioneering work in devising methods for determining the sequence of nucleotides in a nucleic acid.