(Hypertension. 1997;29:b5.)
© 1997 American Heart Association, Inc.
Awards |
CIBA Award for Hypertension Research 1996
An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract. |
Dr Smithies received the CIBA Award for his groundbreaking work in the use of homologous recombination to insert altered genes into specified positions in the DNA of living cells and the application of this technique to transfer "designer mutations" to living animals and to the study of high blood pressure and cardiovascular diseases.
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Dr Smithies was born in Halifax, England, and received his DPhil in Biochemistry in 1951 at Oxford University. After 2 years as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin, he spent 6 years at the Connaught Medical Research Laboratory in Toronto, Ontario, where he invented the first high-resolution gel electrophoresis system. This technique led to his discovery of inherited differences in the serum proteins of normal individuals. Thereafter, he returned to Wisconsin as a geneticist. As the field progressed from studying proteins to cloning DNA, Dr Smithies changed to his present discipline of molecular genetics.
In 1985 Dr Smithies demonstrated for the first time that planned modifications to the genome could be made in living cells by means of homologous recombination (gene targeting). In 1987 he helped to show that gene targeting in mouse embryonic stem cells could be used to alter specific genes in the mouse genome leading to the subsequent production of "designer mice." One of the earliest mutants made in Dr Smithies’s laboratory, which is now at the University of North Carolina, provides a mouse model of cystic fibrosis.
Dr Smithies is a member of the US National Academy of