Oliver Smithies, a recipient of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, has been awarded the American Institute of Chemists (AIC) Gold Medal.
"Oliver Smithies" work has changed the science of genetic medicine and paved the way for today's gene therapy research," said Jerry Jasinski, AIC president.
Smithies was born in 1925 in Yorkshire, UK. He won a scholarship to Oxford University, where he earned a BA with first-class honours in physiology in 1946 and a PhD in biochemistry in 1951. As a researcher at the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories of the University of Toronto from 1953-1960, he greatly improved gel electrophotoresis, a process of separating proteins to identify genes, by using starch. His innovation simplified the procedure and became standard practice in laboratories and helped to earn him the Nobel Prize in 2007.
In 1960 Smithies joined the laboratory of genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and made groundbreaking discoveries concerning embryonic stem cells and DNA recombination in mammals, which led to the creation of gene targeting, which is now applied to virtually all areas of biomedicine. His laboratory was also the first to develop mouse models for cystic fibrosis, thalassemia, hypertension, and atherosclerosis.
In 1988 Smithies became the Excellence Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.