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Jai Ganesh

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Registered: 2005-06-28

Posts: 49,845

Re: crème de la crème

2189) George Pearson Smith

Gist:

Life

George Smith was born in Norwalk, Connecticut in the United States. He studied at Haverford College in Pennsylvania and then at Harvard University, where he obtained a doctorate in bacteriology and immunology in 1970. After a stay at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, he moved to the University of Missouri in Columbia. He remained there for the rest of his career, but spent time at Duke University in 1983–1984, where he began his Nobel Prize awarded work.

Work

Evolution – the adaption of species to different environments – has created an enormous diversity of life. George Smith has used the same principles – genetic change and selection – to develop proteins that solve humankind’s chemical problems. In 1985, he developed an elegant method known as phage display, where a bacteriophage – a virus that infects bacteria with its genes – can be used to evolve new proteins. This method has led to new pharmaceuticals, for example.

Summary

George P. Smith (born March 10, 1941, Norwalk, Connecticut, U.S.) is an American biochemist known for his development of phage display, a laboratory technique employing bacteriophages (bacteria-infecting viruses) for the investigation of protein-protein, protein-DNA, and protein-peptide interactions. Phage display proved valuable to the development of treatments for conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis and contributed to the investigation of disease-causing peptides, such as those produced by Plasmodium falciparum, a parasite that causes malaria. For his discoveries, Smith was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which he shared with American chemist Frances Arnold and British-born biochemist Sir Greg Winter.

Smith carried out his undergraduate studies at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania, earning an A.B. degree in biology in 1963. He later earned a Ph.D. (1970) in bacteriology and immunology from Harvard University. In 1975, after working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin, where he studied under British-born American scientist and later Nobelist Oliver Smithies, Smith went to the University of Missouri, joining the faculty as an assistant professor of biological sciences. Smith remained at Missouri for the duration of his career, eventually becoming Curators’ Distinguished Professor in 2000.

In 1983, while on sabbatical, Smith went to Duke University. There he developed fusion proteins by inserting foreign DNA fragments into phage gene III, which encoded a coat protein expressed on the phage virion surface. When taken up by a phage, fusion proteins generated via gene III were displayed on the virion surface. Phage display enabled purification through antibody recognition, whereby antibodies directed against the foreign amino acid sequence could be added to culture dishes to select for fusion phages, producing cultures enriched with a specific fusion phage.

Phage display was revolutionary at the time in part because it enabled researchers to clone and amplify foreign gene sequences. The technique also laid the foundation for Sir Greg Winter’s research on the directed evolution of antibodies and his use of phage display to develop novel antibody-based therapies. Adalimumab, the first human antibody therapy produced using phage display, was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2002 for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Smith was a recipient of the Promega Biotechnology Research Award (2007).

Details

George Pearson Smith (born 10 March 1941) is an American biologist and Nobel laureate. He is a Curators' Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, US.

Career

Born in Norwalk, Connecticut, he earned his A.B. degree from Haverford College in biology, was a high school teacher and lab technician for a year, and earned his PhD degree in bacteriology and immunology from Harvard University. He was a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin (with future Nobel laureate Oliver Smithies) before moving to Columbia, Missouri and joining the University of Missouri faculty in 1975. He spent the 1983–1984 academic year at Duke University with Robert Webster where he began the work that led to him being awarded a Nobel Prize.

He is best known for phage display, a technique where a specific protein sequence is artificially inserted into the coat protein gene of a bacteriophage, causing the protein to be expressed on the outside of the bacteriophage. Smith first described the technique in 1985 when he displayed peptides on filamentous phage by fusing the peptide of interest onto gene III of filamentous phage. He was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work, sharing his prize with Greg Winter and Frances Arnold.

Human rights advocacy

Smith is an advocate for equal rights for Palestinians and Israeli Jews in their common homeland, and a strong supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. 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."

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