When I was teaching at UBC and living on Bowen, I tried to get an early ferry to Horseshoe Bay and then drive to UBC where Joan and I would breakfast at the now defunct Faculty Club. We usually got there about 6:30 or quarter to seven and invariably the only other early breakfaster would be the smiling, welcoming Mike Smith, of the Biochemistry Dept. It was always a fun breakfast because Mike was a fun guy.
When I first graduated from UBC, I worked for the BC Research Council, trying to solve problems for BC industry. There was another youngish guy working in the other half of the building, in the high power lab of later to be Nobel Laureate, Gobind Khorana. Mike Smith worked with Gobind, whose lab was next door to my office. At that time, though I got to know my neighbor, Gobind, I only knew Mike through his white sports car, regularly parked until late in the night outside the building.
Michael Smith was born in a small town on the outskirts of Blackpool in mid western England. His parents were market gardeners earning a marginal living selling their vegetables and flowers. He attended a village school up to his 11-plus exam, in which he topped the school. His parents, sensing that they had a very special son, convinced the best school in the area, a ‘public school’ (meaning that the students, except for scholarship students, paid fees to attend) to accept him.
Being a life-long man of the people, Mike fought this decision: he didn’t have the ‘right accent’, or the right bite – he had a distinct overbite. His parents prevailed and Mike reluctantly donned the uniform and soon made a name for himself at Arnold School for Boys, excelling in sciences, particularly chemistry. When he graduated from secondary school, he chose to go to Manchester University to study chemistry. He enrolled in the toughest chemistry program offered, Honors Chemistry, with 59 others. It was very challenging and at the end of the program 4 years later, only 43 were left. Did he ace it? Not at all, he even failed a course here and there, ending up with second-class standing. He was mortified and figured he was doomed to mediocrity. His advisor informed him that at Manchester even a second means you are a very smart guy. Manchester accepted him into a doctorate program without the necessity to take a Masters degree. He finished in the spring of 1956. On graduation Mike looked around for a job or a post doctoral fellowship. The pickings were extremely thin, but one of his friends had turned down a position at the B. C. Research Council at the University of British Columbia to work with a young ace biochemist named Gobind Khorana (Nobel Laureate, 1968). Not having much to choose from, Mike accepted the job and headed for Vancouver. Mike was also an outdoors guy and he loved sports cars – BC was just the place for him.
The Council was divided into two parts: those who worked to solve industrial problems such as egg spoilage in storage (that was me) and the advanced biochemistry group (that was Khorana and Mike). In the evenings and well toward 3 or 4 in the morning the lights were on in the biochemistry end of the building and the rest was dark. Khorana worked the longest hours and 7 days a week (a good 18+ hours a day). A white sports car would often be there in the night but not quite as consistently as Khorana’s conservative small sedan. After all Khorana got his Nobel in 1968 and Mike had to wait until 1993. Mike worked hard at BCRC but he also played hard, learning to ski and rock climb and he was not known to turn down a party. Working with Khorana provided Mike with knowledge of cutting edge DNA and RNA biochemistry, which would drive his research for the rest of his life. He also taught Mike the kind of drive necessary to work toward a Nobel Prize.
In 1960, UBC did not offer Khorana a university position or stable funding and the University of Wisconsin did, so the whole group went off to Madison, Wis. including Mike. The outdoors in Wisconsin cannot compare with BC, so Mike soon found a way to return to Vancouver, accepting a position with the Fisheries Research Board, a government lab, but again at UBC. Here Mike worked on salmon and other species of marine life, but always tending towards the biochemical fundamentals. After five years of trying to toe the government line, Mike finally resigned from the government job and he was appointed to a professorship at UBC where he remained for the rest of his days. He happily did his fundamental research, often working with leading edge biochemists in England and the US, still enjoying BC’s outdoors and his sports cars. After he spent a year with Fred Sanger (a double Nobel Laureate) at Cambridge, he returned bubbling with ideas, eventually working out the details of inserting DNA in chromosomes where he wanted to in Site Specific Mutagenesis.
Think, get an idea, try out the idea, think again, get another idea and try it, and then discuss it and then get yet another idea, and so forth until the problem is solved. This often takes years. The secret is never to give up until the problem is solved.
This work began about 1970, and it was finally published in 1979. It took a while to be recognized but its value in gene therapy and making medically useful products, such as yeast produced human insulin, was obvious. No one should think that Mike worked alone. He always had a group of brilliant postdoctoral fellows and graduate students around him. He was marvelous at inspiring hard work and long hours to solve incredibly difficult biochemical problems. Think, get an idea, try out the idea, think again, get another idea and try it, and then discuss it and then get yet another idea, and so forth until the problem is solved. This often takes years. The secret is never to give up until the problem is solved. That is what Nobel Prizes are made of.
Soon Mike and a colleague from the University of Washington started a company in Seattle to produce pharmaceuticals from genetically modified microorganisms. They were very successful and the company was bought out by a multinational corporation: Mike became a multi-millionaire. What a change in his life from a childhood of struggle against poverty, particularly when an early frost destroyed the crop and his family’s business went into receivership!
Being wealthy did not change Mike. He still worked 14-16 hours a day, now with more administrative duties than he would like but with as many hours at the lab bench as he could muster. Though he was getting older he still skied and he still partied, and when it came to his work, he was deadly serious.
Since he removed his hearing aids when in bed and the Nobel Committee usually phones in the middle of the night (so recipients get the message before the press), he didn’t hear the phone when they called. That fall in 1993, the Nobel Committee eventually informed him that he shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry with an American chemist. Being already wealthy, he gave all his half million-dollar prize money to charity. He was now a huge national science hero with invitations from grade schools to prestigious universities and he was generous with his time to all the invitations he could possibly handle. What a wonderful man.
Sadly, he was diagnosed with a rare, incurable blood disease. He didn’t slow down though and generously gave his limited time until his untimely death in Oct. 2000. Now, almost 14 years later, he is still missed.
