John Derek Smith FRS (1924–2003) was a British molecular biologist who participated in many of the major discoveries at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge.
[1] In 1955 he married Ruth Aney (marriage dissolved 1968); died Cambridge 22 November 2003.
He had a long term relationship with Rosemary Myers, an artist, which continued until his death.
According to Nobel Laureate Sidney Altman "John Smith was a venerable nucleic acids biochemist.
He had worked on the nucleic acids of viruses long before coming to the MRC-LMB and was an expert on identification and characterization of nucleotides, much of it done on unlabeled material, detected by observing chromatographs under UV light.