The Division of Molecular Pharmaceutics will present a seminar by 2007
Nobel Prize laureate Oliver Smithies on Wednesday, February 13.

The seminar is titled "Thoughts on the Kidney". It will be held in Kerr Hall,
room 1001, from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. A reception will follow in the main lobby.

Smithies, who shared the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, is the Excellence Professor at the UNC
School of Medicine and a member of the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. His lab focuses on developing animal models for studying gene
therapy in hypertension and other genetic disorders, including sickle cell disease. He has been a UNC faculty
member for 19 years, and his career has seen numerous honors and two
major innovations that have fundamentally changed the science of genetic
medicine and laid the foundation for today's research into gene therapy.

In the mid-1980s, while at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Smithies
codiscovered the technique known as "gene targeting", which led to the
creation of transgenic mice, or "designer mice," that replicated human
disease. His lab produced the first animal model of cystic fibrosis, a disease
caused by one defective gene, and also studied high blood pressure, atherosclerosis and other diseases. This research method is now commonplace in biomedical research and has been the basis for thousands of published papers.

In the 1950s, while at Connaught Medical Research Laboratory in Toronto, Smithies greatly improved gel electrophoresis, a process of separating proteins to identify genes, using starch. The innovation simplified the procedure and became standard in laboratories.

For more information about the seminar, please contact Kathryn Fiscelli in MOPH at 919-962-0082 or Jenny Langenbach in the Department of Pathology at the School of Medicine at 966-6912.