Derek George Smyth

After retiring from NIMR, Smyth continued his research at the Institute for Molecular Biology in Salzburg (56, 57), in the Pharmacology Department of the University of Murcia (58-61) and in the William Harvey Research Institute, University of London (62). For a number of years (1977-1982) he was invited formally to assist the Nobel Committee in their nomination of candidates for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and in 1997 he was elected as an honorary member (Excmo) of the Royal Academy of Medicine and Surgery in Murcia (60).

The enzymatic processing of prohormones to release their biologically active constituents was a dominant lifetime interest. His major contribution came from studies of β-lipotropin (61), now recognised as a component of the pro-opiomelanocortin locus. In a classic series of papers from 1975 to 1982, he and his team (26-34) showed that the C-terminal fragment of lipotropin, discovered by Smyth in the pituitary (35-37), was an endogenously expressed opiate (38). Feldberg and Smyth demonstrated that this 31 amino acid peptide, now known as β-endorphin, is a neurohormone with potent analgesic activity (39-43) and profoundly significant in brain function (40, 44, 45).

Derek Smyth was Head of the Laboratory of Peptide Chemistry at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) in Mill Hill, London from 1972 to 1992. He had worked previously with Professor Joseph Fruton, Head of the Biochemistry Department at Yale University, where he gained experience in protein and peptide chemistry (1-3) and in 1960 transferred to Rockefeller University in New York City where in the laboratory of Stanford Moore and William Howard Stein (Nobel Prize winners) he reinvestigated and established the definitive amino acid sequence of pancreatic ribonuclease (4-8), the first enzyme (some say the first protein) to have its primary structure determined (9).

On moving to NIMR in 1963, Smyth prepared two novel derivatives of oxytocin, N-carbamylcystine-1-oxytocin and N-carbamyl cystine-1-O-carbamyltyrosine-2-oxytocin, and in a collaborative study with Gordon Bisset it was shown that while the monocarbamyl hormone retained weak biological activity (10), the dicarbamyl derivative proved to be a specific inhibitor of oxytocin devoid of intrinsic activity (11,12), demonstrating that the action of the hormone takes place in consecutive stages that could be studied independently (13).

Derek Smyth FRSC (born 24 April 1927) is a British biochemist who specialises in peptide structure and function. In 2002, he was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.