UNC Nobel Laureate Oliver Smithies dies at age 91

Oliver Smithies, D.Phil., who was recruited to North Carolina with grant funding from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 20 years later, died today at the age of 91. In 1987, the Biotechnology Center helped recruit seven researchers from the University of Wisconsin in Madison to start the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s molecular biology and biotechnology research program. The Biotech Center’s faculty recruitment grant program, inaugurated to help attract that group of Wisconsin scientists, was named to honor Smithies after he became a Nobel laureate in 2007.