Willie W. Smith

Willie White Smith (1907 – August 29, 1989) was an American physiologist specialized in radiobiology. She researched the effects of radiation on bone marrow and the production of white blood cells at the National Institutes of Health.

Education Smith was born in 1907, in Thomson, Georgia. She had 4 brothers and 3 sisters. She graduated from Agnes Scott College in 1927. Her dissertation was titled Contracture in the Gastrocnemius of the Frog.

Career and research Smith began her career at NIH in 1943, in a laboratory that eventually became a part of the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases. Her first research projects concerned the acute toxicity of DDT, soon to be used by American troops in Italy and North Africa, and of methyl chloride—a substitute refrigerant and ingredient in synthetic rubber. Later, Smith guided a young radiologist through some experimental work, after which she began her radiobiology studies of the effects of radiation. The young radiologist— Robert Q. Marston—went on to become the Director of NIH from 1968 to 1973. In those early days of investigating the damaging effects of radiation, Smith studied the influence of environmental factors (altitude, temperature, hypoxia, exercise), endocrine factors and dietary factors on the effects of radiation and recovery from sublethal doses. She went on to study the role of infection in death from radiation, and the effects of antibiotics and the body's own cellular defenses in countering radiation. In the early 1950's she was invited to witness an atomic bomb test in Nevada and examine the blast area. The test was set up to simulate an A-bomb explosion in a residential area. In 1953 Smith and her colleagues were transferred to the laboratory of biophysics (later to become the laboratory of physiology) in the National Cancer Institute (NCI) where she continued her studies of the effects of radiation on bone marrow and the production of white blood cells.

Selected works