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BIOLOGIST

Oliver Smithies

1925 - 2017

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Icon of person Oliver Smithies

Oliver Smithies (23 June 1925 – 10 January 2017) was a British-American geneticist and physical biochemist. He is known for introducing starch as a medium for gel electrophoresis in 1955, and for the discovery, simultaneously 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. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Oliver Smithies has received more than 178,402 page views. His biography is available in 48 different languages on Wikipedia. Oliver Smithies is the 116th most popular biologist (up from 139th in 2019), the 805th most popular biography from United Kingdom (up from 974th in 2019) and the 20th most popular British Biologist.

Memorability Metrics

  • 180k

    Page Views (PV)

  • 60.88

    Historical Popularity Index (HPI)

  • 48

    Languages Editions (L)

  • 11.41

    Effective Languages (L*)

  • 2.75

    Coefficient of Variation (CV)

Page views of Oliver Smithies by language


Among BIOLOGISTS

Among biologists, Oliver Smithies ranks 116 out of 841Before him are George Davis Snell, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, Sydney Brenner, John Ray, Giovanni Sartori, and Archibald Hill. After him are William Bateson, Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin, Ferdinand Cohn, Norman Borlaug, Har Gobind Khorana, and Coenraad Jacob Temminck.

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Contemporaries

Among people born in 1925, Oliver Smithies ranks 70Before him are Dick Van Dyke, Claude Lanzmann, Francisco Álvarez Martínez, Baruch Samuel Blumberg, Hilda Gadea, and Hal Holbrook. After him are József Bozsik, Bill Haley, Robert Rauschenberg, Ernest Gellner, Michel de Certeau, and Harry Harrison. Among people deceased in 2017, Oliver Smithies ranks 59Before him are Jonathan Demme, George Andrew Olah, Harry Dean Stanton, Adam West, Georges Prêtre, and Giovanni Sartori. After him are Derek Walcott, Pierre Bergé, Jacque Fresco, Michael Nyqvist, Abdul Halim of Kedah, and John Heard.

Others Born in 1925

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Others Deceased in 2017

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In United Kingdom

Among people born in United Kingdom, Oliver Smithies ranks 805 out of 7,765Before him are John Vane (1927), Wentworth Miller (1972), Edgar F. Codd (1923), Rob Roy MacGregor (1671), Francis Hutcheson (1694), and David McCallum (1933). After him are Prince John of the United Kingdom (1905), Rodney Robert Porter (1917), Edward Burne-Jones (1833), Robert FitzRoy (1805), William Bateson (1861), and George Porter (1920).

Among BIOLOGISTS In United Kingdom

Among biologists born in United Kingdom, Oliver Smithies ranks 20Before him are Julian Huxley (1887), John Gurdon (1933), William Carey (1761), Philip Sclater (1829), John Ray (1627), and Archibald Hill (1886). After him are William Bateson (1861), Martin Evans (1941), Desmond Morris (1928), Charles Scott Sherrington (1952), Anna Atkins (1799), and Michael Houghton (1949).