One of Canada’s leading cancer researchers, in 1993 Smith and Kary B. Mullis won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work in altering DNA to determine how it worked.
Half of his prize money went to study schizophrenia; the other half was used to endow a fund to support the Society for Canadian Women in Science and to train elementary school teachers in science. Smith died in Vancouver, B.C., on October 4 from leukemia — one of the diseases he was working to cure. He was 68.