George Smith gave this piggy bank to one of his colleagues, Stephen Parmley, as a memento of an early experiment when working on phage display. Parmley had developed a vector, a particle used to inject DNA in living cells. The vector was named pIG3C. The experiment was unsuccessful, but the piggy bank became the laboratory mascot for decades.
The piggy bank was donated to the Nobel Prize Museum by Stephen Parmley in 2018.
This test tube contains the solution in which George P. Smith first applied the phage display method. The phage display method, which Smith developed, uses bacteriophages, viruses that attack bacteria, to produce new proteins. Smith received the test solution from Paul Modrich (who, incidentally, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2015).
George P. Smith donated the test tube to the Nobel Prize Museum in 2018.
