Nobel laureate and former UW geneticist Oliver Smithies dies at 91
By Noah Habenstreit | Jan. 12, 2017Oliver Smithies, a renowned geneticist, Nobel laureate and former UW-Madison professor, died Tuesday at the age of 91. The British-born scientist was best known for developing a method of introducing genes into the genome of a mouse, which allowed future scientists to observe the effects of thousands of genes and better combat disease. Smithies, along with two other scientists, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2007 for his work, much of which he performed during a 29-year stint at UW-Madison. “Just before he left here he did the major piece of work [for which he won the Nobel Prize],” the late UW-Madison genetics professor James Crow said in 2007, according to a university release.
