Nobel Prize winner Michael Smith, Canada's bright light of genetics research, died Wednesday night of cancer at the age of 68.
As the news of his death spread across the country yesterday, it came as a shock to many of his colleagues and the students he taught at the University of British Columbia.
Dr. Smith had told only a small circle of his close friends about his two-year battle with a form of leukemia. Many learned he was in hospital Monday night after he had gone to work earlier in the day.
"Canada has lost a really fine human being," said Barry McBride, vice-president academic and provost at UBC, adding that he was the first professor at the university to win a Nobel Prize.
Dr. Smith is remembered not only for the chemistry award he won in 1993, but how he used the $500,000 given to him.
The biochemist was honoured for developing a crucial technique used in genetic engineering called site-directed mutagenesis.
Previously, researchers could study DNA but not change it. They were limited to dealing with accidental changes, which happen naturally. Dr. Smith's work enabled them to take a piece of DNA, change it chemically and generate a mutation which could be used to test their hypotheses.
But Dr. Smith didn't keep his prize money. He gave half of it to the Schizophrenia Society of Canada and the Canadian Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia. The other half was established as an endowment fund to support the Society for Canadian Women in Science and Technology and a program for elementary school teachers provided by Science World BC.
"He was a selfless person," said Ronald Kluger, a chemistry professor at the University of Toronto and a friend of Dr. Smith's. "He was a giant of a man for what he did for others as much as what he did on his own."
Mr. Kluger remembers receiving a call from Dr. Smith after he went to Sweden to collect his prize. Since Dr. Smith had decided to donate all the money, he said he had pay for the trip both for himself and his family.
"The Nobel Prize ended up costing him a lot of money," Mr. Kluger said.
Those who worked with him at B.C. Cancer Agency's Genome Sequence Centre in Vancouver, where he was director, said he had an aura about him that earned him great respect.
"He's no ordinary Mike," said Victor Ling, vice-president of research at the BC Cancer Agency and vice-dean at UBC's faculty of medicine.
Dr. Smith, an avid fisherman and skier, was praised in Vancouver, the city he moved to after receiving his PhD in 1956 from the University of Manchester. He was voted the No. 1 intellectual in B.C. this August in a story in The Vancouver Sun.
His list of awards and honours are lengthy, including Companion of the Order of Canada in 1995.
The university recently announced that a new two-storey building will bear his name and house the biotechnology laboratory he founded in 1987.
Dr. Smith, born in Blackpool, England, to a working-class family, joined UBC in 1966 to teach in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
He fought to stop the brain drain from Canada to the United States and for increased research spending in the health-care budget.
"This discrepancy in research funding has had the predictable effect: an inability to compete; a loss of morale, particularly in young research trainees; and a loss of the brightest and most ambitious researchers to the USA," he said in a 1999 article in The Lancet.
Dr. Smith leaves his wife, Helen, and three children, Tom, Ian and Wendy. *** ***
Correction
Late Nobel Prize winner Michael Smith leaves his estranged wife, Helen, and three children, Tom, Ian and Wendy. He also leaves his partner, Elizabeth Raines. Incorrect information appeared yesterday. (Saturday, October 7, 2000, Page A2)