Hamilton Othanel Smith (August 31, 1931 – October 25, 2025) was an American microbiologist and Nobel laureate.
Early life and education
Hamilton Othanel Smith was born in New York City on August 31, 1931 and grew up in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois.
Smith 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 School of Medicine in 1956. which is now known as HindII. H. influenza was the same organism in which Smith had discovered restriction enzymes in the late 1960s. He subsequently played a key role in the sequencing of many of the early genomes at The Institute for Genomic Research, and in the assembly of the human genome at Celera Genomics, which he joined when it was founded in 1998.
Smith later directed a team at the J. Craig Venter Institute that worked towards creating a partially synthetic bacterium, Mycoplasma laboratorium. In 2003 the same group synthetically assembled the genome of a virus, Phi X 174 bacteriophage. Smith was scientific director of privately held Synthetic Genomics, which was founded in 2005 by Craig Venter to continue this work. Synthetic Genomics is working to produce biofuels on an industrial-scale using recombinant algae and other microorganisms.
Personal life and death
Smith was married to Liz Smith until her death and they had five children. He died at his home in Ellicott City, Maryland, on October 25, 2025, at the age of 94.
References
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