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Log inMainer behind mapping human genome dies
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Mainer behind mapping human genome dies
by Outspoken on Fri Jul 25, 2008 4:25 am
Mainer behind mapping human genome dies
Victor McKusick, born on a Parkman dairy farm, pioneered linking diseases to specific genes.
From news service reports
Portland Press Herald
Insights from the fully transcribed human genome -- those 3 billion letters of DNA -- will drive the medical discoveries of the 21st century and probably the 22nd century as well. And yet the person most responsible for this astonishing advancement seemed fully rooted in the 19th.
Victor A. McKusick, the "father of medical genetics," and chief advocate of the once-outlandish notion of mapping and sequencing all the human genes, died Tuesday at his home outside Baltimore. He was 86.
He was born Oct. 21, 1921, on a dairy farm in rural Parkman, Maine, 20 minutes after his identical twin, Vincent. The two were the youngest of five children of their parents, teachers who emphasized the value of education.
Vincent McKusick became a lawyer and retired in 1992 as chief justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.
Victor McKusick was a pioneer in linking diseases to specific genes and began the first database of gene functions, a repository that includes more than 18,000 human genes.
The two-week course in genetics taught by McKusick and his colleagues every summer in Bar Harbor, Maine, became perhaps the best-known and most respected course in the subject, bringing in more than 4,000 students, doctors and researchers and introducing them to an entirely new way of addressing illnesses.
"Today we have lost a legend," said Dr. Edward D. Miller, dean of the Johns Hopkins medical faculty and chief executive of Johns Hopkins Medicine. "His influence and legacy reach around the world."
It seems logical that McKusick's background -- he grew up within a day's walk of where all four of his great-grandfathers had been born -- was a big part of the reason he was drawn to genetics, the field of biology characterized by the simple persistence of things.
Add to that the fact that McKusick was an identical twin, and the deal was clinched. He was his own anecdotal evidence, a walking embodiment of how life is a conversation between what you bring in the form of genetic endowment and what you experience as a consequence of choice and chance.
McKusick went to a one-room elementary school. His high school offered no science courses.
Early on, though, Victor decided he wanted to be a physician.
After college and medical school, both shortened by World War II, the physician settled into an academic career at Johns Hopkins. At the time he chose medical genetics as his field of interest, the number of human chromosomes was not known for certain. (The question was resolved in 1956, as 46 -- 23 pairs, including the sex chromosomes).
http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=201360&ac=PHnws
(AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi, File)
Victor McKusick, born on a Parkman dairy farm, pioneered linking diseases to specific genes.
From news service reports
Portland Press Herald
Insights from the fully transcribed human genome -- those 3 billion letters of DNA -- will drive the medical discoveries of the 21st century and probably the 22nd century as well. And yet the person most responsible for this astonishing advancement seemed fully rooted in the 19th.
Victor A. McKusick, the "father of medical genetics," and chief advocate of the once-outlandish notion of mapping and sequencing all the human genes, died Tuesday at his home outside Baltimore. He was 86.
He was born Oct. 21, 1921, on a dairy farm in rural Parkman, Maine, 20 minutes after his identical twin, Vincent. The two were the youngest of five children of their parents, teachers who emphasized the value of education.
Vincent McKusick became a lawyer and retired in 1992 as chief justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.
Victor McKusick was a pioneer in linking diseases to specific genes and began the first database of gene functions, a repository that includes more than 18,000 human genes.
The two-week course in genetics taught by McKusick and his colleagues every summer in Bar Harbor, Maine, became perhaps the best-known and most respected course in the subject, bringing in more than 4,000 students, doctors and researchers and introducing them to an entirely new way of addressing illnesses.
"Today we have lost a legend," said Dr. Edward D. Miller, dean of the Johns Hopkins medical faculty and chief executive of Johns Hopkins Medicine. "His influence and legacy reach around the world."
It seems logical that McKusick's background -- he grew up within a day's walk of where all four of his great-grandfathers had been born -- was a big part of the reason he was drawn to genetics, the field of biology characterized by the simple persistence of things.
Add to that the fact that McKusick was an identical twin, and the deal was clinched. He was his own anecdotal evidence, a walking embodiment of how life is a conversation between what you bring in the form of genetic endowment and what you experience as a consequence of choice and chance.
McKusick went to a one-room elementary school. His high school offered no science courses.
Early on, though, Victor decided he wanted to be a physician.
After college and medical school, both shortened by World War II, the physician settled into an academic career at Johns Hopkins. At the time he chose medical genetics as his field of interest, the number of human chromosomes was not known for certain. (The question was resolved in 1956, as 46 -- 23 pairs, including the sex chromosomes).
http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=201360&ac=PHnws
(AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi, File)
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