University Killam Professor, Peter Wall Distinguished Professor of
Biotechnology Biotechnology Laboratory, University of BC, Vancouver, BC
Michael Smith was born into a working-class family in Blackpool, England. Smith was offered a scholarship to a local private school called Arnold School. Eventually he entered the honours chemistry program at Manchester University and got a state scholarship and completed a PhD. In 1956 he heard of a young scientist in Vancouver, Canada, Gobind Khorana, who had a position available to work on biologically important molecules with phosphates. Going to Vancouver turned out to be a very good decision, because in Khorana's lab Smith began learning the chemistry that would lead to the Nobel Prize in 1993. Smith's idea for which he won the Nobel prize was to slip a synthetic stretch of nucleotides--called an oligonucleotide--into some DNA on one side. The synthetic segment is added to normal DNA using standard chemicals for breaking and reforming DNA chains, but putting, for instance, an Adenine molecule where there should be a Guanine to create a mutation. It took Smith and his team many years of work to actually do it. In the process they had to learn new techniques, design new chemicals and develop new chemical processes. One of the chemical method developed by Smith is now used in every modern automated gene synthesize machine.
Sources: personal interview
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