Oliver Smithies

Oliver Smithies is a Britishborn American geneticist and Nobel laureate, credited with the introduction of starch as a medium for gel electrophoresis in 1955, and the simultaneous discovery, with Mario Capecchi and Martin Evans, of the technique of homologous recombination of transgenic DNA with genomic DNA, a much more reliable method of altering animal genomes than previously used, and the technique behind gene targeting and knockout mice.

Smithies was born in Halifax, West Yorkshire, England. He has said that his love of science comes from an early fascination with radios and telescopes. Smithies graduated First class with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physiology in 1946 and then earned a second bachelors degree in chemistry. He also received a Master of Arts degree 1951 and a Doctor of Philosophy in Biochemistry in 1951 at Balliol College, Oxford. On scholarship to Oxford, Smithies dropped out of medical school to study chemistry instead.

Source: Wikipedia