Geneticist 1921-

Victor Almon McKusick was born in the little town of Parkman in central Maine, on October 21, 1921. He went to Tufts College in Boston from 1940 to 1943, and then received his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1946. He has remained at Johns Hopkins ever since, rising from a medical student to physician-in-chief of the entire Johns Hopkins hospital and on the way creating the field of medical genetics and changing forever the way medicine is practiced. Due to his interest, energy, determination, and discoveries, McKusick is often called the Father of medical genetics.

Victor McKusick

McKusick was first interested in heart diseases, but he discovered that many of the patients he saw had family members who also had heart problems, piquing his interest in the possibility that genes might be causing these diseases. His interest in genetic disorders continued, and in 1957 he established the first...