State of Minds profile: Dr. Oliver Smithies

In October 2007, North Carolina’s own Dr. Oliver Smithies was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the “discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells." The 82-year-old Smithies, who still goes to the lab seven days a week, is the first full-time professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill to receive a Nobel Prize.

Smithies shares the Nobel with fellow American Mario  Capecchi of the University of Utah and British scientist Sir Martin Evans of Cardiff University for their pioneering work developing the technology to precisely tweak mouse genes, enabling the animals to provide living models of human scourges such as heart disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes and cancer.

The technique, which also has been honed by Smithies’ wife, Nobuyo Maeda, in close collaboration with her husband, is now routinely used by genetics labs worldwide in millions of genetically modified mice.  These rodent recruits help researchers understand disease processes and develop new therapies.

Smithies, a native of Halifax in West Yorkshire, England, has said that his love of science comes from an early fascination with radios and telescopes.  On scholarship to Oxford, Smithies dropped out of medical school to study chemistry.  He then moved to the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories at the University of Toronto in 1953. After seven years there, he set up shop at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. That brought an increasingly close collaboration with Japan native Maeda. Then, in 1987, said Smithies, Maeda's research hit some roadblocks at Wisconsin.

The timing was right for UNC. A faculty recruitment grant request was submitted to the North Carolina Biotechnology Center for close to $900,000 to bring in Smithies, Maeda and five other promising researchers believed to build the university’s fledgling program in molecular biology and biotechnology. The Biotechnology Center's review board approved the grant in May 1987, and the rest, especially with the Nobel Prize awarded 20 years later, is truly history.  That faculty recruitment grant program will now be named after Smithies.

"We're delighted to see this worldwide recognition for the great bioscience coming out of Dr. Smithies’ lab – and out of the state of North Carolina," said Norris Tolson, president and CEO of the Biotechnology Center. "We are also very proud of the fact that the Biotechnology Center helped make it happen by providing major grant funding to enable UNC to bring him here 20 years ago. It was obviously money well spent."

"I’ve been acutely aware of the Biotechnology Center’s support role," said Smithies, "and my wife and I value it very much. North Carolina can be extremely proud to have seen far enough ahead to set up Research Triangle Park and its associated institutions such as the Biotechnology Center. It’s the crown jewel, you might say. And I’m very much appreciative of the whole endeavor.”

Now a naturalized American citizen, Smithies said he’s never regretted the choice to make North Carolina his research base and his home base. "I've been truly happy here. Otherwise I wouldn’t have stayed here all these years. This is just a marvelous place to be." Despite being severely color-blind, Smithies is a licensed private airplane pilot who enjoys gliding across Carolina blue skies.  He owns one plane now, but at one time owned four.

Asked what he’d say to fellow scientists being recruited to North Carolina, Smithies didn’t equivocate. "I'd tell them, 'Come here. You’ll see excellent biotechnology. Go to any of the leading universities in the state, and you'll find that this is a marvelous area of leading bioscience.' The post–doctorate percentage of the population is said to be higher than anyplace in the United States, including Silicon Valley or Massachusetts. People are nice, even among so-called rival universities, but we cooperate all the time. It’s just a good place to be a scientist."

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