Oliver Smithies

Oliver Smithies
Smithies with the American Institute of Chemists Gold Medal (2009)
Born(1925-06-23)23 June 1925
Halifax, West Yorkshire, England
Died10 January 2017(2017-01-10) (aged 91)
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, US
NationalityBritish, American
Alma materUniversity of Oxford (BA, DPhil)
Known for
SpouseNobuyo Maeda[3]
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
ThesisPhysico-chemical properties of solutions of proteins (1951)
Doctoral advisorAlexander G. Ogston[2]

Oliver Smithies (23 June 1925 – 10 January 2017) was a British-American geneticist and physical biochemist. He is known for introducing starch as a medium for gel electrophoresis in 1955,[4] and for the discovery, simultaneously with Mario Capecchi and Martin Evans, of the technique of homologous recombination of transgenic DNA with genomic DNA, a much more reliable method of altering animal genomes than previously used, and the technique behind gene targeting and knockout mice.[5][6][7] He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2007 for his genetics work.[8][9]

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference frs was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference dphil was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2007".
  4. ^ Smithies, Oliver (December 1955). "Zone electrophoresis in starch gels: group variations in the serum proteins of normal human adults". The Biochemical Journal. 61 (4): 629–641. doi:10.1042/bj0610629. ISSN 0264-6021. PMC 1215845. PMID 13276348.
  5. ^ Smithies, Oliver (2001). "Forty years with homologous recombination". Nature Medicine. 7 (10): 1083–1086. doi:10.1038/nm1001-1083. ISSN 1078-8956. PMID 11590419. S2CID 26845944.
  6. ^ Williams, R. (2011). "Oliver Smithies: Born Inventor". Circulation Research. 108 (6): 650–652. doi:10.1161/RES.0b013e318216f105. ISSN 0009-7330. PMID 21415407.
  7. ^ Gitschier, Jane (2015). "The Whole of a Scientific Career: An Interview with Oliver Smithies". PLOS Genetics. 11 (5): e1005224. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1005224. ISSN 1553-7404. PMC 4447374. PMID 26020970. Open access icon
  8. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2007". The Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 8 October 2007.
  9. ^ Skipper, Magda (2005). "An Interview With Oliver Smithies". Nature Reviews Genetics. 6 (5): 350. doi:10.1038/nrg1627. ISSN 1471-0056. PMID 15880879. S2CID 33591979.