Dr. Victor A. McKusick, a Johns Hopkins professor widely considered the father of medical genetics, has been awarded the prestigious Japan Prize in Medical Genetics and Genomics and the $470,000 that goes with it.
McKusick, one of the leading figures at the medical school, was recognized for more than a half-century of work deciphering and cataloging inherited disorders, and for laying the foundation for what became the Human Genome Project.
"I'm terribly excited about it. It's not small potatoes, obviously, as we would say in Maine," said McKusick, 86, who grew up on a dairy farm there with his identical twin, Vincent, and his parents, who were both educators.
FOR THE RECORD
An article in yesterday's Maryland section misstated the date on which Dr. Victor A. McKusick, a geneticist at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, will formally receive the Japan Prize in Medical Genetics. The ceremony will take place April 23 in Tokyo.
THE SUN REGRETS THE ERROR
In 1966, McKusick published the first edition of Mendelian Inheritance in Man, a compendium of inherited disorders that had 1,500 entries in that printing. The book went through 12 editions, the last published in 1998, before going online. It has 20,000 entries and is continually updated.
Paralleling and in some ways driving the growth of the genetics research field, the catalog at first contained only inherited disorders but eventually covered normal traits such as eye color, along with the thousands of genes whose functions have become known as a result of the genome project.
"Today, researchers and clinicians around the world are sharing the fruits of Dr. McKusick's labors, which have become indispensable to the world of medical genetics," the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan wrote in a statement announcing the prize yesterday.
McKusick will receive his award Wednesday at the National Theater in Tokyo. Two other American scientists, Vinton Gray Cerf and Robert Elliot Kahn, will share the Japan Prize for Information Communication Theory and Technology.
Cerf, vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist of Google Inc., and Kahn, chairman and chief executive officer of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, are recognized for their contributions to the creation of the Internet.
McKusick attended Tufts University in Massachusetts before entering the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1943 without finishing his undergraduate degree. He also completed a residency in internal medicine at Hopkins and began his medical career as a cardiologist.
He developed an early interest in the sounds of the heart. That triggered a curiosity about genetics when he went on to describe the problems associated with Marfan syndrome, an inherited disorder of the connective tissue. People born with the disease have a weak aorta prone to rupture, along with tall stature and vision problems.
