Michael Smith
Smith, Michael (1932-2000) was a British-born Canadian biochemist who was internationally renowned for his groundbreaking work in genetic engineering. He won the 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing the process known as site-directed mutagenesis, essentially a technique for inducing intentional changes, or mutations, in genetic material. He shared the prize with American chemist Kary Banks Mullis, who won for related achievements in biochemistry.
Smith grew up in a working-class family in Blackpool, England. At 11, he was accepted on scholarship to the Arnold School and graduated in 1950. He also received scholarships to the University of Manchester, receiving his B.Sc. degree in 1953 and his Ph.D. degree in chemistry in 1956.
He accepted a fellowship from the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada, to join the research lab headed by biochemist Har Gobind Khorana .
Khorana, himself a Nobel laureate in 1968, was investigating the chemistry of DNA, the large protein molecule that contains the genetic code. Though not trained in this field, Smith found it compelling, and instead of returning to the United Kingdom after a year in North America as intended, he remained at UBC under Khorana's mentorship. In 1960, when Khorana moved his research team to the University of Wisconsin's Institute for Enzyme Research, Smith moved as well.
The following year, Smith returned to British Columbia and was hired by the Fisheries Research Board of Canada Laboratory in Vancouver. There he studied marine physiology and endocrinology in addition to continuing his Khorana-influenced research into the chemistry of nucleotides, the building blocks that make up the long, chainlike strands of DNA. In 1966, he returned to academia as part of the biochemistry faculty at UBC, and was made full professor in 1970. Aside from a number of long sabbaticals, Smith remained at UBC for the rest of his life, and in 1991 became, for a time, acting director of the university's then newly established Biomedical Research Centre.
It was during one of Smith's sabbaticals, in 1976, that he first conceived the idea for site-directed mutagenesis. He spent that year at the Medical Research Council laboratory in Cambridge, England, studying genomics, the understanding of the sequence and function of nucleotides in DNA, and his idea originated from this work.
In Khorana's lab, Smith had been successfully creating synthetic nucleotides, or oligonucleotides. His idea in site-directed mutagenesis was essentially to replace a chain of naturally occurring nucleotides in a strand of DNA with a segment of oligonucleotides. When this altered DNA was put back into the organism, such as a bacterium, it would cause some of the organism's features or properties to change, or mutate.
After five years of trial and error, Smith finally achieved success in perfecting the process, and his technique has since had a revolutionary impact on science and medicine. Through oligonucleotide site-directed mutagenesis, scientists can now select any naturally occurring sequence of genes and replace it with genes created in a laboratory through chemical processes, to gain specific intentional results. Such results might include the development of unique bacteria, new strains of plants, and ultimately cures for diseases, particularly hereditary diseases. Foods are already being genetically altered and scientists even expect that they will ultimately be able to exchange human genes considered less desirable for “better” genes, ones that would result in higher intelligence or better athletic prowess, for instance.
Smith also cofounded Zymos, a biotechnology firm. It was later sold and became ZymoGenetics.
In 2001, the Canadian government provided a $110 million Canadian ($167,299 million American) grant to establish the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research in his name.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Smith received many other awards and honors, including the Boehringer Mannheim Prize of the Canadian Biochemical Society (1981), the Gairdner Foundation International Award (1986), and the Flavelle Medal, Royal Society of Canada (1992).