Sir. Richard J. Roberts is the Chief Scientific Officer at New England Biolabs. He obtained a B.Sc. in Chemistry and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry at the University of Sheffield in England. His postdoctoral research was carried out in Professor J.L. Strominger’s laboratory at Harvard, where he studied the tRNAs that are involved in the biosynthesis of bacterial cell walls. From 1972 to 1992, he worked at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, becoming Assistant Director for Research under Dr. J.D. Watson. He began work on the newly discovered Type II restriction enzymes in 1972 and in the next few years more than 100 such enzymes were discovered and characterized in his laboratory. In 1993 he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and in 2008 he was knighted.