New research centre opened in honour of Nobel Laureate

The first of three state-of-the-art facilities that will eventually form one of the largest biomedical complexes in Europe has been officially opened in the UK.

The new £50m Michael Smith Building, named in honour of the late Nobel Laureate, will be home to 800 University of Manchester scientists drawn largely from the Faculty of Life Sciences. By 2007 the 10,000m² facility will be connected to two more new developments to create a biomedical hub at the forefront of international research.

The Michael Smith Building will house more than 100 research groups including a number of externally funded centres, such as The Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell-Matrix Research, The North of England Structural Biology Centre and The UK Centre for Tissue Engineering. A major part of the funding has come from an award from the Joint Infrastructure Fund, which was co-sponsored by the UK Government and the Wellcome Trust.

'The complex is sited at a central location in the University's biomedical corridor,' said Professor Martin Humphries, Associate Dean for Research within the Faculty of Life Sciences. 'Over the past 10 years, a major programme of cell-biological research has been established here in Manchester and a major benefit of the design of the new building has been to cluster core facilities and provide easily accessible resources for researchers.'

  Dr Michael Smith was an alumnus of The University of Manchester, graduating in Chemistry in 1953 before continuing his postgraduate studies in the same department. He received his PhD in 1956 and then moved to Gobind Khorana's laboratory in Vancouver, Canada, where he studied the synthesis of biologically important organophosphates.

In 1966, he was appointed a University of British Columbia Professor of Biochemistry and received the Nobel Prize in 1993 for developing the technique of site-directed mutagenesis. He died in 2000, aged 68.