Oliver Smithies

Oliver Smithies (23 June 1925 to 10 January 2017) was a British-American geneticist and physical biochemist. He introduced starch as a medium for gel electrophoresis in 1955, and he discovered, at the same time as Mario Capecchi and Martin Evans, the technique of homologous recombination of transgenic DNA with genomic DNA. That method is a much more reliable way of altering animal genomes than earlier ones and is the basis of gene targeting and knockout mice. He received the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this genetics work. Smithies was born in Halifax, West Yorkshire, England, to William Smithies, who sold life insurance policies, and Doris, a teacher of English at Halifax Technical College; he had a twin brother and a younger sister. In his later career he was the Excellence Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he co-authored more than 350 research papers and reviews between 1948 and 2016.