Arno Motulsky

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Arno Gunther Motulsky (born July 5, 1923 in Fischhausen, East Prussia ; † January 17, 2018 in Seattle ) was a German-American doctor , geneticist and co-founder of pharmacogenetics . From 1959 until his retirement he was director of the Clinic for Genetics at the University of Washington in Seattle. In an obituary in the New York Times named the director of the US National Institutes of Health , Francis Collins, quoted as saying: "The connection between heredity and response to drug therapy, nobody thought about it until they started it 60 years ago."

Life

Escape to America

Arno Motulsky grew up in Fischhausen, a small town on the Samland coast near Königsberg in what was then the province of East Prussia . He came from a Jewish family and attended a humanistic grammar school in Königsberg until 1937 . However, the increasing discrimination against Jews in Germany after the so-called seizure of power by the National Socialists caused his family to move to Hamburg in 1937 with the intention of emigrating from there to the United States . Arno's father managed to move to Cuba in 1938, from where he hoped to get to his brother in Chicago soon and then be able to bring his family to join him. In fact, in May 1939, the mother managed to organize for herself, her two sons and her daughter to travel to Cuba on board the St. Louis .

The passengers - including many people released from concentration camps - had valid tourist visas for Cuba, but since Cuba had recently put special regulations in place for immigrants, the Cuban government refused them entry at the end of May after their arrival in Havana . Arno Motulsky's father tried to get his family off board with the help of a rented motor boat, but it failed. Since the US government and the government of Canada also refused to accept the refugees, the St. Louis finally drove back to Europe. Two days before their arrival in the English Channel , Belgium , the United Kingdom , France and the Netherlands agreed to grant asylum to travelers on board the St. Louis , and the ship was able to end its long odyssey in Antwerp . The Motulskys were then housed in Brussels ; shortly afterwards the father managed to move to Chicago as planned.

Ms. Motulsky tried to get entry papers for the USA from Brussels, which she succeeded on May 1, 1940. Before she could book a ship passage, Belgium was attacked by German troops from May 10th . As a result, the Motulskys and thousands of other Germans were arrested by the Belgian police as "hostile foreigners". The mother and two younger siblings were released shortly afterwards, but all the men, including 16-year-old Arno, were taken to an internment camp in western France in cattle trucks. With the advance of the German armies, the internees were deported to the south of France to a camp near Saint-Cyprien . After the Armistice of Compiègne (1940) , most of the interned Germans were released, while the Jews continued to be held under steadily deteriorating conditions, and most of them were transferred to the Gurs internment camp .

Since Arno Motulsky was still in possession of a valid entry visa for the USA, he managed to be transferred to a transit camp in Aix-en-Provence , from where he was allowed to travel to Marseille to renew his visa. His father telegraphed him US $ 350 for ship passage, and ten days before his 18th birthday in 1941 he was allowed to travel to Portugal via Spain ; the Nazi-friendly Spanish dictatorship refused to allow 18- to 40-year-old German Jews to pass through. From Lisbon, Motulsky finally reached New York City and later his relatives in Chicago. His mother and siblings survived the Holocaust in Europe. Before the German occupiers, they fled Brussels to France, where they were picked up by German troops and sent back to occupied Brussels. When they were about to be deported to Poland in 1943, they managed to go into hiding with the help of Belgian friends, to take a train to the French- Swiss border with false papers and to cross this border on foot at night. In Switzerland they were picked up by the police, but since they were in possession of an American entry visa, they were not deported to Germany, but instead placed in empty hotels. After the end of the Second World War , the mother and her two children moved to the USA.

Career in the USA

After Arno Motulsky came to the United States at the age of 18, his life gradually returned to normal. In the French internment camps he had observed and learned to appreciate the work of doctors, which is why he attended evening medical courses in Chicago. Although he had not yet accepted US citizenship, he was drafted into the army and sent off by this to study medicine at Yale University ; further training after basic studies took place as part of a special program for military doctors from 1944 at the University of Illinois at Chicago , which he completed there in 1947 with a doctorate . Further training stations were the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, where his mentor Karl Singer aroused his interest in the special field of hematology .

In 1953 Motulsky moved to the University of Washington to teach hematology, but increasingly devoted himself to understanding the genetic sensitivity to drugs , i.e. the relationship between pharmacology and population genetics . After a guest year (1956/57) with Lionel Penrose at the Galton Laboratory of University College London , he worked in Washington on, among other things, hemolytic anemia , in particular glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase and the development of atherosclerosis in the interaction of heredity and Environmental influences . He was the first to succeed in an experimental bone marrow transplant (in white-footed mice ) to cure spherical cell anemia . Another research topic was the molecular genetics of color perception . Together with his post-doctoral student Joseph L. Goldstein , he laid the foundation for research into familial hyperlipoproteinemia , the continuation of which brought Goldstein and his colleague Michael Stuart Brown the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine . Motulsky also devoted himself to research into the genetic consequences of the atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the effects of drugs on the victims.

Arno Motulsky has published more than 400 scientific specialist publications and co-authored the newly published standard work for the study of human genetics , Human Genetics. Problems and Approaches .

Honors

Arno Motulsky was a member of the National Academy of Sciences , the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1977 he gave the George M. Kober Lecture . In 2003 the German Society for Human Genetics awarded him their GfH Medal of Honor . In 2009, he was from the Hebrew Union College of Dr. Bernard Heller Prize awarded.

Since 2009, the Department of Medicine at the University of Washington has held the annual Arno & Gretel Motulsky Annual Lecture in honor of the Motulsky couple .

Works

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Obituary , University of Washington, accessed January 21, 2018, obituary
    on legacy.com
  2. ↑ Arno Motulsky, a Founder of Medical Genetics, Dies at 94. On: nytimes.com of January 29, 2018
  3. ^ Holding Out Hope in a Cruel World. On: washington.edu , accessed June 25, 2015 (PDF; 1.3 MB)
  4. ^ Arno Motulsky History. On: washington.edu , accessed June 25, 2015
  5. ↑ Noted geneticist once was turned away from US shores. On: hsnewsbeat.uw.edu , accessed on January 21, 2018
  6. ^ Professor Arno Motulsky, recipient of the GfH Medal of Honor. German Society for Human Genetics, accessed on January 21, 2018
  7. ↑ Dr. Arno Motulsky Received 2009 Dr. Bernard Heller Prize at Hebrew Union College. On: huc.edu , accessed on January 21, 2018
  8. ^ The Arno & Gretel Motulsky Annual Lecture . On: medgen.uw.edu , accessed on January 21, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Motulsky, Arno
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Motulsky, Arno G.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American hematologist and geneticist
DATE OF BIRTH July 5, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Fischhausen, East Prussia
DATE OF DEATH 17th January 2018
Place of death Seattle