Canada 150: Michael Smith figured out how to target genetic mutations

This brilliant Nobel laureate was best known as a regular guy — rumpled, humble, generous and as happy mentoring the broader public regarding the importance of science to their lives as he was enthralled by the complexities of his difficult research. He like camping, hiking, sailing, skiing and listening to Sibelius. Light reading ran to The New Yorker and The Guardian. If the stereotype of the driven genius is a cold aloofness, Smith, say his colleagues at UBC, is remembered instead as a warm humanitarian, thrilled by his work and compassionate toward everyone else.

He was born in 1932 into a working-class family in Blackpool, a British seaside resort better know for its frivolities — an illuminated tower, a pier, penny arcades, donkey rides for kids on the Sands — than for scholarship. But at a state-run elementary he scored high on examinations determining which pupils qualified for higher education. Scholarships took him to a PhD in chemistry from the University of Manchester in 1956. He then sought the best mind in his field, molecular biochemistry, to guide his post-doctorate studies. That was Har Gobind Khorana with the B.C. Research Council in Vancouver, who would win a Nobel Prize in 1968 and who taught his precocious English student the organic chemistry of biological molecules which make up DNA, the building blocks of life.

When Khorana and his research team moved to Wisconsin, Smith followed, but a year later returned to Vancouver to a post with the Fisheries Research Board of Canada Laboratory. From there, he went to UBC’s Faculty of Medicine as a professor of biochemistry.

At UBC, he was founding director of a new biotechnology lab. He turned out to be a whiz at science administration as well as research. He believed strongly in the value of interdisciplinary work. UBC named the Michael Smith Laboratories in his honour in 2004. There he led the research into how genes within DNA molecules store and transmit information. He figured out how to make genetic mutations occur in precise locations in DNA. It won him the Nobel Prize in 1993. He gave half his prize money to Science World and the Society for Canadian Women in Science and Technology. The other half he gave to researchers working on the genetics of schizophrenia. He died in 2000. Today, the lab bearing his name employs 250 research staff and has more than a dozen major honours.

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