Dr. Hamilton Othanel Smith (born August 23, 1931) is an American microbiologist.

Smith was born on August 23, 1931, and graduated from University Laboratory High School of Urbana, Illinois. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but in 1950 transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his B.A. in Mathematics in 1952 ^*. He received his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1956.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1978 for discovering type II restriction enzymes with Werner Arber and Daniel Nathans as co-recipients.

He later became a leading figure in the nascent field of genomics, when in 1995 he and a team at The Institute for Genomic Research sequenced the first bacterial genome, that of Haemophilus influenza. H. influenza was the same organism in which Smith had discovered restriction enzymes in the late 1960s.

External link

• autobiography

1931 births | Living people | Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine winners | Microbiologists American biologists Members and associates of the US National Academy of Sciences | University of California, Berkeley alumni

Hamilton Othanel Smith | Hamilton O. Smith | ハミルトン・スミス | Hamilton O. Smith | Hamilton O. Smith