For decades scientists assumed that genes are continuous segments within deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the chemical template of heredity. In 1977, however, Richard J. Roberts, a thirty-four year old British scientist working with adenovirus, the same virus that is one cause of the common cold, discovered that genes (the functional units of heredity) can be composed of several separate segments rather than of a single chain along the DNA strand. For his discovery of split genes, Roberts, along with colleague Phillip A. Sharp, was awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine in 1993.

Richard John Roberts was born in Derby, England, a mid-sized industrial city about forty miles northeast of Birmingham. His father, John Roberts, was a motor mechanic, while his mother, Edna (Allsop) Roberts, took care of the family and served as Richard's first tutor. In 1947, the Roberts family moved to Bath, where Roberts spent his formative years. At...