Founder of medical genetics dies

Victor McKusick, who founded the field of medical genetics at Johns Hopkins University, died on Tuesday, July 22, at his home outside Baltimore. He was 86 years old. "Victor's vision is reflected in his early recognition of the inherent value to medicine of mapping the human genome," said Aravinda Chakravarti, director of the McKusick-Nathans Institute in a 2002 linkurl:statement.;http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/press/2002/MAY/020509.htm "His contributions to the practice of genetics in medicine are thus seminal, phenomenal and ageless." McKusick was working as a cardiologist at Johns in the 1950s, when he encountered a patient with a serious defect in his aorta. He noticed that the man had other symptoms, such as being unusually tall compared to his family and having a dislocated eye lens, both tell-tale signs of Marfan syndrome. As he started treating other Marfan patients, he began tracking the patterns of inheritance of the disease. He founded the Division of Medical Genetics,...