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KEYNOTE LECTURE
PROFESSOR

GEORGE PEARSON SMITH

CRACKING INTO A BACTERIOPHAGE’S GENOME

AUTHOR
BEATRIZ ALMEIDA

George Pearson Smith is an Ameri-
can biologist and a Nobel laureate Cura-
tors' Distinguished Professor Emeritus
of Biological Sciences at the University
of Missouri.
Born in Norwalk, Connecticut (10
March, 1941), he studied at Haverford Col-
lege in Pennsylvania and then at Harvard
University, where he obtained a phD de-
gree in bacteriology and immunology in
1970, with the thesis “The variation and
adaptive expression of antibodies”. He
was a postdoc at the University of Wis-
consin (with future Nobel laureate Oliver
Smithies) before moving to Columbia, Mis-
souri and joining the University of Missouri
faculty in 1975. He spent the 1983–1984 ac-
ademic year at Duke University with Rob-
ert Webster where he began the work that
led to him being awarded a Nobel Prize.
He is best known for his work in
“phage display”. This is a laboratory tech-
nique used for the study of protein-pro-
tein, protein-peptide and protein-DNA in-
teractions. It uses bacteriophages ( small
viruses that infect bacteria), where a spe-
cific protein of interest sequence is artifi-
cially inserted into the coat protein gene
of the bacteriophage, causing the phage
to “display” the protein on its outside while
containing the gene for the protein on its
inside, resulting in a connection between
genotype and phenotype.
These displaying phages can then be
screened against other proteins, pep-
tides or DNA sequences, in order to de-
tect interaction between the displayed

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