Oliver Smithies

Oliver Smithies (born June 23, 1925, Halifax, Yorkshire [now in West Yorkshire], England—died January 10, 2017, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, U.S.) was a British-born American scientist who, with Mario R. Capecchi and Sir Martin J. Evans, won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for developing gene targeting, a technology used to create animal models of human diseases in mice.

In 1951 Smithies earned both a master’s degree and a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Oxford and later moved to the United States, where he studied at the University of Wisconsin. The following year he joined the Connaught Medical Research Laboratory at the University of Toronto, where he developed the starch gel electrophoresis technique, an advanced method of separating and identifying blood proteins. In 1960 he returned to Wisconsin to teach, and in 1988 he joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

While researching gene therapy as a method for treating hereditary diseases in the 1980s, Smithies uncovered the work that Evans had been doing on the embryonic stem cells of mice. Using a sample obtained from Evans, he demonstrated that targeted removal or alteration of genes within the stem cells allowed for the controlled manipulation of the mouse genome. He and Capecchi used that breakthrough to breed mice with specific disease conditions. In 1991 Smithies and his laboratory created a “knockout mouse”—so named because one of its genes had been experimentally replaced or “knocked out”—that accurately modeled human cystic fibrosis.

Smithies was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1971. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Smithies, Capecchi, and Evans won the 2001 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, and Smithies and Capecchi shared (with Ralph L. Brinster) the 2003 Wolf Prize for Medicine.