NEWS

Lasker Award-winning geneticist to present at Sept. 25 Chancellor’s Science Seminar Series

By BETHANY GREER
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- Dr. Oliver Smithies – a pioneering leader of genetic research who on Sunday (Sept. 16) was announced a recipient of the 2001 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, often called "America’s Nobels" – will be the featured speaker for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chancellor’s Science Seminar Series Sept. 25.

Smithies, Excellence Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Carolina’s School of Medicine, will discuss his lengthy career as a researcher at the 7 p.m. free lecture at Memorial Hall. The speech is entitled "Fifty Years at the Bench: A Geneticist’s-Eye View of the Breathtaking Advances of Research."

Parking will be available in the Hanes and Swain lots off Cameron Avenue. A reception will be held in the Old Well Room of The Carolina Inn following the lecture.

The Lasker Awards represent the nation’s most distinguished honor for outstanding contributions to basic and clinical medical research. Three scientists worldwide are recipients of the 2001 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, and the award recognizes the researchers’ contributions to development of a powerful technology for manipulating the mouse genome with exquisite precision, which allows the creation of animal models of human disease, the so-called "knockout mice."

The Chancellor’s Science Seminar Series, sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, is designed to spotlight the work of world-renowned investigators in the basic and applied sciences, and enhance the public’s awareness of the relevance of these scientific discoveries to their daily lives.

"The College of Arts and Sciences established the Chancellor’s Science Seminar Series to demonstrate the kind of teaching and research in the sciences at Chapel Hill with the broader university community and with school children across the state, " said Dr. Risa Palm, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. "We are delighted to have Oliver Smithies lead the series this fall, to share his extraordinary experiences at the cutting edge of genetic research."

In conjunction with the lecture, Smithies will host an hour long teleconference in Sitterson Hall with area high school students from 9:50 a.m. to 10:50 a.m. Sept. 28. The event will be broadcast live via streaming video through the LEARN North Carolina World Wide Web site (www.learnnc.org). LEARN North Carolina, a program of Carolina’s School of Education, is a statewide network of educators that uses the power of the Internet to improve K-12 education in North Carolina.

Smithies, at age 76, continues to work nearly every day at the bench in the university laboratory he shares with his colleague and wife, Dr. Nobuyo Maeda, a UNC pathology professor whose own research has influenced Smithies’ work.

During the course of a career spanning more than half a century, Smithies has pioneered techniques advancing the study of ailments ranging from jet lag and inflammation to cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, heart disease and high blood pressure.

Smithies invented the process of high-resolution gel electrophoresis in the 1950s at the Connaught Medical Research Laboratory in Toronto. The made it possible for scientists to separate proteins quickly and easily, leading to the discovery of inherited differences in serum proteins in healthy people. In 1985, he discovered that he could make planned modifications to the genome of a living cell by inserting modified DNA into the cell. Two years later, he showed that such "gene targeting" in mouse embryonic stem cells could be used to alter specific genes in the mouse genome.

Thousands of researches around the world have adopted his techniques, greatly advancing medical treatment for many major diseases.

He has won numerous national and international research awards, including the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation Prize. He has received awards from the American Heart Association for hypertension research and the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation for his studies on the role of genes in cardiovascular research. Last year, he received the International Okamoto Award from the Japan Vascular Disease Research Foundation, one of the most prestigious honors bestowed in Japan.

Smithies, born in Yorkshire, England, won a scholarship to Oxford University. He received a bachelor of arts degree (first class honors) in physiology from Oxford in 1946, and went on to earn his master’s degree and doctorate in biochemistry from Oxford.

Smithies came to Carolina in 1988, after a distinguished career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He also is a licensed airplane pilot and is especially fond of gliding.

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Note: Additional materials about the Lasker Awards are available at www.laskerfoundation.org. For additional information on Smithies, click on http://www.unc.edu/depts/design/smithies

News Services contact: Deb Saine, (919) 962-8415