Victor A. McKusick
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Victor Almon McKusick (born October 21, 1921) is a professor of genetics at Johns Hopkins University and main instigator of Mendelian Inheritance in Man, now often referred to unofficially as the "McKusick catalogue".
Biography
He was born on a dairy farm in Parkman, Maine; an identical twin, Vincent would qualify from Harvard Law School and serve as a chief justice on the Maine suppreme court. Victor was hospitalised at Massachusetts General Hospital as a 13-year old, and he now traces his desire to study medicine back to this event. He did undergraduate studies at Tufts University before going to medical school at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he would receive his M.D. in 1946.
Originally, McKusick trained as a cardiologist. In this field, he often saw patients with Marfan syndrome, an inherited connective tissue disorder, which sparked his interest for medical genetics. Although he would make further contributions to the field of cardiology, e.g. in a collection of heart murmurs in 1958, he became gradually more interest in genetics, which was then mainly the domain of biologists and rarely touched the field of medicine.
In 1966, he would publish the first version of his Mendelian Inheritance in Man, which is now in its 12th edition. He was elected to the chair of medical genetics in Johns Hopkins (year??) and would retire officially in 1985. Nevertheless, he is still actively involved in maintenance of the MIM catalogue.
In 1988, McKusick was was the founding president of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO), the organisation behind the Human Genome Project.
In 1997, he won the highest honor in American science, the Albert Lasker Special Achievement Award.
He is married to Dr Anne McKusick, a rheumatologist.
References
- McKusick VA. Mendelian Inheritance in Man; A Catalog of Human Genes and Genetic Disorders. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. ISBN 0801857422.
- Nature & Nurture; When It Comes to Twins, Sometimes It's Hard To Tell the Two apart (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/twins/twins1.htm) (Washington Post Magazine article on identical twins, featuring Dr McKusick and his brother).
External links
- The McKusick collection (http://medicalarchives.jhmi.edu/sgml/mckusick.html) (personal papers)
- Bibliography (http://medicalarchives.jhmi.edu/biblio/McKusick,%20Victor%20A..htm) of Victor A. McKusick
- Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=OMIM) (to search OMIM)