SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY

Victor A. McKusick, 86; Johns Hopkins Physician Pioneered Genetics Research

from the Los Angeles Times (registration required)

Dr. Victor A. McKusick, the Johns Hopkins University physician who is widely regarded as the father of medical genetics, died Tuesday at his home in Baltimore. He was 86 and died of complications from cancer.

McKusick was a pioneer in linking diseases to specific genes and began the first database of gene functions, a repository that now includes more than 18,000 human genes.

The two-week course in genetics taught by McKusick and his colleagues every summer in Bar Harbor, Maine, became the best-known and most respected course in the subject, bringing in more than 4,000 students, doctors and researchers from all over the country and introducing them to an entirely new way of addressing illnesses.