Hamilton O. Smith

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. Between 1956 and 1957 Smith worked for the Washington University in St. Louis Medical Service. During the next few years he undertook US Navy military service as well as a medical residency at Henry Ford Hospital. Hamilton then went to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on a US National Institutes of Health fellowship where he worked with infectious disease expert Myron M. Levine. In 1975, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship he spent at the University of Zurich. In 1970, Smith and Kent W. Wilcox discovered the first type II restriction enzyme, which is now known as HindII.