Victor McKusick Dies

Medical genetics pioneer earned a Lasker Award and National Medal of Science

Written byBob Grant and Edyta Zielinska

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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 ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
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From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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Edyta Zielinska
Edyta Zielinska was a senior editor at The Scientist from 2007 to 2013, where she worked closely with scientific illustrators to develop accompanying graphics to illuminate complex concepts.
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