The whole of a scientific career: an interview with Oliver Smithies.

Jane Gitschier,Oliver Smithies

doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1005224

Abstract

They say that the third time’s the charm, and in the case of my interviewing Oliver Smithies (Fig 1), this old saw held true. Twice before over the past five years I had scheduled an interview with Smithies, only to find myself canceling for one reason or another. Fortunately, Smithies didn’t hold my fickleness against me and agreed to an interview in mid-February. I plotted my travel to Chapel Hill (where Smithies is on the faculty of the University of North Carolina) along a southern route to avoid the blizzards that paralyze the Chicago, Denver, and New York airports every winter, only to encounter an ice-storm that sent the Research Triangle into its own deep freeze. Fortunately, my plane and I made it safely, and I had no trouble meeting Smithies at the appointed time.

Highlights

Departments of Medicine and Pediatrics and Institute for Human Genetics, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, California, United States of America
Balliol, got me started with a small gift of money to have them electronically scanned commercially, but that didn’t work out, and I was going to have them electronically archived through the University here in North Carolina
What we found out was—and it took us a long time to find this out—that there are two primary forms of the alpha chain

Summary

Introduction

Balliol, got me started with a small gift of money to have them electronically scanned commercially, but that didn’t work out, and I was going to have them electronically archived through the University here in North Carolina. Gitschier: Your first notebook, you think, was as a graduate student in Oxford? Gitschier: And we know that homologous recombination of the haptoglobin 2 can expand to a triplication, just as with the Bar locus.

Results

Conclusion