ABOVE: THE SCIENTIST STAFF
In the late 1970s, Stuart Orkin’s research landed him on the front page of The New York Times—and in a bit of hot water with a few colleagues. Orkin, then a newly minted assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, was developing a way to prenatally diagnose genetic disorders using DNA from the fetus. He was working with Boston Children’s hematologist David Nathan, as well as with collaborators at Yale who had developed a clinical technique to draw blood directly from a fetus during the second trimester using a fine needle. The technique “was quite a tour de force at the time,” Orkin recalls, but it was also risky, increasing the chance of miscarriage.
Despite the risk, the researchers wanted to use the technique to help a family from Turkey that had been referred to Nathan. The family carried a deletion ...
