A Life at the Bench
by Mark Derewicz
This article was originally published in Endeavors in 2008.
Early in the morning on October 8, Oliver Smithies got the call. Carolina’s first Nobel Prize winner had spent half a century doing the science he loves.
In 1936, when Oliver Smithies was eleven years old, his uncle lent him a telescope with a broken lens. Oliver wanted to fix it, so he read stacks of Scientific American magazines at the local library.
“I remember getting quite a long way with making an eight-inch lens,” Smithies says. “But at one stage I had to heat it up and unfortunately I didn’t understand something properly and it cracked.”
Days of work down the drain. But Smithies shook it off and tried to make a smaller lens with the remnants of the first. He sprinkled grinding powder on a thick slab of mirrored glass and used a metal soup can attached to a drill press to cut the glass down to size. He wasn’t sure the edge of the soup can was sharp enough to cut the mirror, but he tried anyway. For hours, Smithies withstood the piercing screech of metal boring into glass, turning that drill handle and watching the soup can rotate slowly until it finally cut through.
“And I did make that lens,” he says. “But I could never get that telescope to work.” Smithies, though, realized that he loved the process more than anything. He loved making things. And he did eventually make a telescope, along with a bunch of other cool stuff.
As an adult, he was still tinkering and inventing. By age sixty, in 1985, Smithies had garnered several awards for various discoveries and inventions, and was still working at his lab bench every day. But at that time, Smithies was in the throes of a complex series of experiments, well beyond telescopes and pulverized glass and so tediously long that graduate students left to pursue other goals. Many scientists doubted his hypothesis. Could Smithies actually insert a segment of DNA into the gene of a mammalian cell, and prove that the DNA segment took up residency at the proper location in the cell’s genetic material? Smithies thought he would have quite an invention on his hands — a way to target specific genes so that, potentially, mutated genes could be replaced or repaired.
The method took years. It was cumbersome and unwieldy, but he got it to work. He successfully targeted a specific gene. Around the same time and independently of Smithies, geneticist Mario Capecchi also figured out gene targeting. And in England, Martin Evans had successfully isolated the embryonic stem cells in a mouse, altered the genes of those cells, and reintroduced the cells into a foster mouse to create genetically modified offspring.