Alan Smith grew up in southern England thinking he wanted to go into astronomy. But once at Christ's College in Cambridge, Smith realized that the required physics courses bored him. He switched his focus to biochemistry, a rapidly evolving field, and earned his bachelor's degree in 1967. He then set out to earn his PhD at the prestigious MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB).
"The structure of DNA had only been known for 12 years at that point," recalls Smith, now 61 and chief scientific officer at Cambridge, Mass.-based Genzyme. "Protein synthesis - how it happened - was only beginning to be sorted out. And the people who were doing it were right there."
Smith says he was more than a little star-struck to find himself at the LMB, at a place that "to this day, has won more Nobel prizes than any other square footage of the planet." Despite ...
