George Smith

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.[6] 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.[8] 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.

Awards and honors

 2000 University of Missouri Curators' Professor
 2001 Elected Fellow – American Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS)
 2007 American Society for Microbiology Promega Biotechnology Research
Award
 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Greg Winter and Frances Arnold
 2020 Elected Member – United States National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
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.
Early life
I was born March 10, 1941 to Albert Mark Smith II (March 2, 1908 to February 3,
1978) and Jessie Patton Biggs Smith (September 14, 1909 to June 14, 2000). My
brother Mark (A. Mark Smith III) was born December 29, 1942 and my sister Helen
(now Helen Boyd) was born June 22, 1947.

My father graduated from West Point (the U.S. Military Academy) in 1930, but left
the army for civilian life immediately afterward. He had steady employment during
the Depression, and he and my mother, who married in 1936, lived in relative
prosperity in those years.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor occurred nine months after my birth. My father
immediately re-joined the army and continued as a career officer until his retirement
in 1965. This meant that our family moved very frequently while Mark, Helen, and I
were growing up. By the time I graduated from ninth grade in 1955, I’d attended an
extraordinary 11 or 12 schools. Most of the schools were on army bases, where all the
kids moved as frequently as we did. That meant that the new kid in school was rapidly
assimilated into society, without having to spend a painful year or two as outsider. I
learned how to make new friends rapidly, but not how to maintain long-term
friendships – a pattern that continues to some degree to the present day.

Mostly my father was posted up and down the East Coast, but during the Korean War
he served in Japan from 1951 to 1954. The rest of the family joined him there in April
1952, just as the U.S. occupation was coming to an end.