George Smith | |
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.jpg) Smith during Nobel press conference inStockholm, December 2018 | |
| Born | George Pearson Smith[1] (1941-03-10)10 March 1941 (age 84) Norwalk, Connecticut, U.S. |
| Education | |
| Known for | Phage display |
| Spouse | Marjorie Sable[2] |
| Awards | 2018Nobel Prize in Chemistry |
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| Thesis | The variation and adaptive expression of antibodies. (1970) |
| Doctoral advisor | Edgar Haber |
George Pearson Smith (born 10 March 1941)[3][4] is an American biologist andNobel laureate.[5] He is a Curators' Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at theUniversity of Missouri inColumbia, Missouri, US.
Born inNorwalk, Connecticut, he earned hisA.B. degree fromHaverford College in biology, was a high school teacher and lab technician for a year, and earned hisPhD degree in bacteriology and immunology fromHarvard University.[6] He was a postdoc at theUniversity of Wisconsin (with future Nobel laureateOliver Smithies) before moving to Columbia, Missouri and joining the University of Missouri faculty in 1975. He spent the 1983–1984 academic year atDuke University with Robert Webster where he began the work that led to him being awarded a Nobel Prize.[7][8][9][2][10]
He is best known forphage display, a technique where a specificprotein sequence is artificially inserted into thecoat protein gene of abacteriophage, causing the protein to be expressed on the outside of the bacteriophage. Smith first described the technique in 1985 when he displayedpeptides onfilamentous phage by fusing the peptide of interest onto gene III of filamentous phage.[8] He was awarded the 2018Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work, sharing his prize withGreg Winter andFrances Arnold.
Smith is an advocate for equal rights for Palestinians and Israeli Jews in their common homeland, and a strong supporter of theBoycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.[11] On the topic of religion, Smith is quoted as saying "I'm not religious or Jewish by birth. But my wife is Jewish and our sons are bar-mitzvahed, and I'm very engaged with Jewish culture and politics."[12]
including the Nobel Lecture 8 December 2018Phage Display: Simple Evolution in a Petri Dish| International | |
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