Smith, George Pearson

Smith, George Pearson,

1941–, American biologist, b. Norwalk, Ct., Ph.D. Harvard, 1970. Smith has been a professor at the Univ. of Missouri, Columbia, since 1975 (emeritus since 2015). He shared half of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Sir Gregory P. WinterWinter, Sir Gregory Paul,
1951–, British biochemist, Ph.D. Cambridge, 1976. He has spent most of his career as a researcher at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, where since 2014 he has been professor emeritus.
..... Click the link for more information.
 for their work on the phage display of peptides and antibodies. Smith developed the phage display technique, in which a gene is introduced into a bacteriophagebacteriophage
, virus that infects bacteria and sometimes destroys them by lysis, or dissolution of the cell. Bacteriophages, or phages, have a head composed of protein, an inner core of nucleic acid—either deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) or ribonucleic acid (RNA)—and a
..... Click the link for more information.
 so that the gene produces a protein on the surface of the bacteriophage, thus enabling the protein that the gene produces to be identified. The other half of the prize was awarded to Frances H. ArnoldArnold, Frances Hamilton,
1956–, American chemical engineer, b. Edgewood, Pa., Ph.D. Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1985. Arnold has been a professor at the California Institute of Technology since 1986. She is noted for her work on the directed evolution of enzymes.
..... Click the link for more information.
.