Doctor, 75, Keeps Pace With the Human Race

BALTIMORE — Maybe it was discipline imposed by cold early mornings and the cows waiting impatiently in his father's dairy barn in Maine.

Or maybe it is just genetic.

In either case, Dr. Victor A. McKusick, 75, can't seem to retire or even slow down after a long career at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. That career has included the founding of Hopkins' Division of Medical Genetics, and quietly convincing the world that by cataloging human genes and the maladies they cause, doctors could discover the nature of the defect in the DNA molecule, and the means to correct it.

"I am cutting back," McKusick said wryly in a 10th-floor office at Hopkins crammed with books and medical journals. "I only work half-days now . . . 12 hours."

McKusick's work in medical genetics was honored recently in New York with the presentation of the Albert Lasker Award for Special Achievement in Medical Science.

The prize, which includes a $25,000 honorarium, is considered one of the most prestigious in medicine. Yet McKusick sought to downplay it, suggesting that its prestige is in part a product of well-crafted "ballyhoo."

"Isn't that like Victor to come up with some other explanation other than his own excellence?" said Dr. Francis Collins, who heads the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health. He described McKusick as a "humble, delightful, articulate historian of the whole enterprise. He would be the last person to promote himself."

The Lasker award, Collins said, "is viewed as the most highly prestigious medical award given in the U.S. It is a launching pad for the Nobel. And with a very impressive nominating committee. . . . You don't get on the short list without a lot of good reasons."

As the mysteries of many infectious and nutritional diseases have been solved, what remain are the chronic disorders with genetic origins. So medical genetics has emerged in the last decade or two as the central science cutting across all medical disciplines.

"In the research lab, no matter what you are studying, the approach is through molecular genetics," Collins said. "And the advance that's coming in the next 10 to 15 years is an invasion of clinical medicine of all sorts by medical genetics as well."

Whether they are looking at cancer, diabetes, hypertension, asthma or even mental illness, doctors will have to incorporate genetic screening and familial histories into their daily work.