While it's not unusual for a doctor to be an avid flier, Dr. Oliver Smithies is neither your usual doctor, nor is he your typical avid flier. This 3,500-hour pilot is one of the nation's leading research scientists, and though he doesn't like to discuss it, he tends to be the topic of conversation each year when colleagues start mulling over nominees for the Nobel Prize. "People think it's possible," he says with a mild, lilting voice through which you can barely discern the accent of his native Yorkshire. "It's not a particularly good thing to go around thinking about. It sometimes changes your way of life too much."
His first love was not science, however, but flight, which he discovered as a 14-year-old while watching gliders flitting about in the skies of prewar England. "I always wanted to fly, but I didn't think I could because I was color-blind," he says. Aviation's loss turned out to be science's gain — and humanity's as well. He made his first of two major scientific contributions in 1956 when, at 30 years old, he invented a method of separating proteins that was better than any method used before. "It was accidental — I didn't know I was going to do it," Smithies says. "It opened up a whole field of understanding the genetic differences between people." His paper on the subject was one of the most widely quoted in scientific literature.
His second major discovery came 30 years later, this time not by accident — and it's something that has incredible potential for humanity. "I thought it might be possible to alter genes in living cells by introducing DNA into the cells with a slightly different structure, and it would change the gene," he says. "Later we showed we could transfer not only from cells in cultures, but into living animals, and make predicted changes." Using this technique, called gene splicing, scientists may well be able to conquer many inherited afflictions of mankind, ranging from certain types of cancer to cystic fibrosis and beyond.
Between these two breakthroughs, the good doctor had also learned something about his color blindness: the FAA would indeed allow him to fly, with only a night flying restriction, and he couldn't operate out of a tower-controlled airport that was using light signals. That was fine with him ("How many times have you operated out of an airport with light signals?" he asks rhetorically), and so at the ripe age of 52 he took his first flying lesson. But his medical hurdles didn't end there. When he went to get his medical, the examining physician said that he had a bit of a problem with his high blood pressure and with the results of a stress test.
Though he failed his medical, he kept right on flying with his instructor. Once he passed through all but the solo work necessary for his private certificate, he leapt into the instrument training regimen. Then a cardiologist told him that the stress test results may have been wrong — but to find out he'd have to have an angiogram. Smithies consented to the test in a heartbeat. An angiogram can be a risky procedure; dye is injected into the heart, then technicians X-ray the organ. During Smithies' angiogram his heart actually stopped beating for a moment — then it started again. More exciting for him, though: he passed the test. At long last (once he completed the solo requirements, of course), he was officially a private pilot, with an instrument rating to boot. Good show.
His next order of business was to acquire aircraft that fit his needs. To keep from being grounded again he bought a Grob 109B motorglider; he needs no medical to fly in glider mode. "It's fun, relaxing, and enjoyable," he says of soaring. And since his work requires him to travel to many conferences across the nation, he bought a Cessna 182. Eventually he even became a CFI, an accomplishment he achieved perhaps because of his love of teaching and respect for flight instruction. "A few hours with an instructor is better that any instrument you can buy," he says, but then he qualifies it a bit and adds, "with the possible exception of GPS."
Not unexpectedly, Smithies finds a great deal of synergy between his work and his passion. "The interaction between flying and work is quite remarkable," he muses. "First, it's a complete getaway; you don't think of anything else. Flying has many things in common with science. Flying is governed by experience and training, and that's much the same in science. If you do a timid experiment, you get timid results; if you do too silly an experiment, you get silly results. That's the same with flying. Learning to fly is learning to overcome fear with knowledge. Most pilots learn that if they know what to do, then they're not scared; in science, if a person learns to do something, then he's not afraid to do it again. And they help each other: one is complete rest from the other. I don't think about work when flying, and I don't think about flying when at work."
And flying has also inspired the next phase of his work. He's looking into ways to genetically alter a person's inherited tendency for high blood pressure. Just think: With more people like Smithies on our team, future pilots may have no excuse — no genetic excuse, that is — for failing a medical.
