Victor McKusick, widely regarded as the father of medical genetics, died on Tuesday, July 22, of complications due to cancer. He was 86 years old.
McKusick's colleagues remember him as a prodigious yet unassuming man of science and medicine. "I've never really known anybody who achieved so much and worked so hard as Dr. McKusick," Vincent Gott, McKusick's long-time collaborator at Johns Hopkins, told The Scientist. "He was absolutely brilliant and yet very soft spoken and understated."
McKusick spent his whole professional career at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. He was awarded the Albert Lasker Award for Special Achievement in Medical Science in 1997 and the National Medal of Science in 2002 for his contributions to the field of medical genetics.
In 1942, McKusick entered medical school at Johns Hopkins before finishing his bachelor's degree (Hopkins relaxed that prerequisite to combat waning enrollment during World War II). Although he possesses an ...
