Oliver Smithies was born on June 23, 1925, in Halifax, England. His father, William, was an insurance salesman; his mother, the former Doris Sykes, was a teacher in a technical college. A heart murmur prevented him from playing sports, so he amused himself by making things. He built a loudspeaker by stretching a pig’s bladder across a wooden frame and made a radio-controlled boat by using an ignition coil from a Ford Model T as a transmitter.

He attended Heath Grammar School, a competitive high school that selected students based on standardized tests. He excelled in mathematics and received a scholarship to Oxford University, where he earned bachelor’s degrees in physiology and chemistry and a doctorate in biochemistry.

After a fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, he moved to the University of Toronto, where he found work as a research chemist.

His lab chief, an expert on insulin, told Dr. Smithies that he could do whatever he wanted, as long as it was related to insulin. In the 1950s, insulin was derived from the pancreases of cows and pigs and was thought to be contaminated with another protein, which today is known as proinsulin. Dr. Smithies set out to find it.

He turned to a method that uses electricity to separate proteins on filter paper. The electrical current typically causes proteins to migrate across the paper; the proteins separate as they move. But when Dr. Smithies ran the experiment, the insulin stuck to the paper. His search for something else to use summoned memories of the gooey liquid his mother had used to starch the collars of his father’s shirts. The liquid, he recalled, set into a gel when it cooled. Would insulin move through the gel in the same way other proteins migrated across filter paper?

Dr. Smithies found a bottle of starch in a chemical storeroom. He cooked the starch, cooled it, and waited as insulin, spurred by electricity, traveled through the goo. Over the next few months, Dr. Smithies worked at improving his method, using it to separate cabbage enzymes and, eventually, the proteins in blood plasma.

He detected proteins in plasma that had not been seen by other researchers who had used the filter-paper method, establishing the superiority of his technology. He went on to discover inherited differences in one of the proteins, a finding that shifted his research toward genetics. (He never completed his insulin study.)