Carolina Alumni Review - November/December 2007

OLIVER SMITHIES — NOBEL LAUREATE

together previously.

The achievement marks the pinnacle of a scientific career for Smithies containing numerous honors and two major innovations that have fundamentally changed the science of genetic medicine and laid the foundation for today’s research into gene therapy.

Smithies’ presence at UNC has been credited with attracting other prominent genetics and genomics researchers. About seven years ago, the medical school started building what it intends to be one of the University’s signature programs: a genetics department built around mouse research and, in the larger sense, a push into genomics research that will involve all of the health sciences on campus. Early in his chancellorship, James Moeser listed genomics as one of Carolina’s top priorities for fundraising and building of a prestigious faculty.

Terry Magnuson, Sarah Graham Kenan Professor and chair of the department of genetics, was one of the first big catches. Other significant names in genetics research followed him almost immediately. Bill Marzluff, the medical school’s executive associate dean for research, who sat at the podium with Smithies in October, said at the time, “There are a lot of eyes on us around the country right now. We’re getting noticed.”

Magnuson said Smithies had “ revolutionized biomedical research. He’s done this in a way that is allowing biomedical scientists to look at the role and function of genes.

“I think the bottom line is he and Mario Capecchi and Martin Evans really changed how research into disease susceptibility is being done,” Magnuson said.Virtu-ally every lab in the world working on disease susceptibility is using Smithies’ methods, he added.

Indeed, Smithies conceded, “you can’t open a scientific journal without finding people who are using this method.” He said that getting the award was “very gratifying.” After working on the research for more than 20 years, he said it’s “rather enjoyable being recognized at this level.

“It feels like what a lot of people have mentioned — a capstone on one’s career.” He said he had no immediate plans to celebrate the award.

He expressed hope that winning the

A Humble Scientist Gets

Nothing that had happened by mid- afternoon on announcement day had worn down any of his humbleness, nor dulled his quick humor. Dressed in the same khakis and plaid shirt, sleeves rolled up past the elbows, that he might wear any day to the lab, he was patient with a room full of reporters who weren’t quite sure what to ask this master of such complicated science.

Oliver Smithies took some time out on the day before the Nobel announcement to fly his motor glider (he also spent some time in the lab, not an atypical weekend activity). It was an uneventful day, as the winds were light and he couldn’t gain altitude.

The “up-current,” as he calls it, blew in early the next morning. The “ proverbial phone call from Stockholm” found him in bed. Years of trying to get laboratory mice to tell us how to manipulate genes to create new therapies for disease had resulted in a Nobel Prize in medicine.

It was not totally unexpected. Smithies and his collaborators in Utah and Wales had been honored for this work before. (At the University of Utah, an anticipatory banner reading, “ Congratulations Mario Capecchi — Nobel Laureate” had been printed every year for the past decade.) They won the Lasker Award, sometimes known as “America’s Nobel,” in 2001. Whatever publicity that might have followed that award was usurped instantly: It was announced Sept. 11.

THE NEWS & OBSERVER/SHAWN ROCCO

“I actually feel rather peaceful about it,” he told the gathering. (He hadn’t even had time to talk to his co-winners.) Then he launched effortlessly into the everyman’s explanation of the genetic code: “A book with 1,000 pages, 1,000 letters on every page, more than 1,000 of these books …”

The 82-year-old with a full crop of

minimally coifed white hair put the trio’s work into a brief timeline. In 1985, he published the paper that showed it was possible to alter the genetic code. Capecchi simplified the process — they began to think not in terms of how to make something happen but how to keep something from happening. Martin Evans figured out how to “make” a mouse that replicated human disease. The work that followed in mouse modeling was centered in Chapel Hill. It was 1989 before they’d made one.