AP Features, October 9th, 2007
Just a few hours after winning the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine, Oliver Smithies arrived at the small office he shares with his wife at the University of North Carolina.
There was, after all, work to be done.
"I don't intend that this will be the end of my scientific career," Smithies said. "I intend to go on for a while yet."
And that is a blessing, said Etta Pisano, vice dean of the school of medicine, one of the many colleagues at North Carolina and elsewhere who interrupted Smithies' work on Monday to offer their congratulations on the high honor, given for research that led to a powerful and widely used technique to manipulate genes in mice.
"There is no doubt that this work will lead to new therapies in virtually every disease that has a genetic basis," Pisano said.
Smithies, 82, shares the $1.54 million (euro1.09 million) prize with Mario Capecchi, 70, of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City; and Sir Martin J. Evans, 66, of Cardiff University in Wales. While they did not work as a team, the three shared information about their research.
"My work was never toward getting the Nobel Prize," Smithies said over a cup of tea at his lab a few hours after the Nobel committee woke him with a pre-dawn phone call. "It was solving a problem, and enjoying the solution."
Smithies is an excellence professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at North Carolina, where for the past 19 years he has used the technique he and the others developed to study hypertension and other genetic disorders. He said Monday he hopes winning the prize will make it easier to secure funding for other work.
"I've always wanted to help with the common diseases, not the rare diseases, working in relation to hypertension, for example," Smithies said.
The accolade adds to his lengthy list of honors. They include the 2001 Albert Lasker Award for basic medical research, which is often called "America's Nobel," and his election to the national Institute of Medicine in 2003. In January, a month after accepting the Nobel in Sweden, Smithies will receive the Genetics Society of America's Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal for lifetime contributions to the science of genetics.
"For decades, he has embodied the very best of academic research and humanity through his modesty, good humor, creativity and love of invention," said North Carolina Chancellor James Moeser. "Through his example, hundreds of students and colleagues have learned how to help the world through research."
Michael Culbertson, a professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin, is among them. Smithies mentored Culbertson in the late 1970s as a professor at Wisconsin, where he co-discovered the Nobel-winning research technique known as "gene-targeting" that allows scientists to deactivate or modifying individual genes in mice.
By observing how those changes affect the animals, researchers are able to uncover clues about what those genes do in human health and disease.
"For one thing, he was a very unusual teacher in terms of style and lecturing," Culbertson said. "He really didn't give sort of standard format lectures and the students were crazy about him. He was one of those people you could listen to for hours and never get tired of him."
While there was no early morning party at his lab, the university feted Smithies at an afternoon reception where hundred of onlookers packed two floors of balconies overlooking the atrium at North Carolina's Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. They watched and cheered as school officials embarrassed Smithies with attention.
More than once, Smithies motioned for the crowd to stop its applause.
"I don't have to wait for a discovery to have a good time," he said during a news conference held just before the event.
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