The Science of Human Perfection by Nathaniel Comfort

Author:Nathaniel Comfort
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300188875
Publisher: Yale University Press

6.1 Victor McKusick, on the right, with his twin brother, Vincent, c. 1924. Courtesy of Alan Mason Chesney Archives, Johns Hopkins University

McKusick was not yet part of that club. He had no formal training in genetics. He did not attend the AAAS or AIBS meetings where the ASHG members congregated. He was an adept networker, but his world was the parochial universe of the wards of Hopkins. In the course of his cardiological experience, he encountered Marfan syndrome, a condition involving heart problems, eye defects, and a tall, gangly stature (Abraham Lincoln is often suspected of having had Marfan). Like Dice and Herndon in rural North Carolina, McKusick sometimes spoke like a naturalist, collecting and doing descriptive taxonomy. “I collected a large number of Marfan patients,” McKusick said, “and analyzed the families from the pattern of inheritance point of view and analyzed the individual cases from the point of view of the clinical manifestations and natural history of the disorder.” He interpreted Marfan as a pleiotropic disorder—one gene, many effects. Like Garrod before him, he sought other similar conditions—in this case other heritable disorders of connective tissue. In 1956 he published a monograph under that title, which collected his findings on Marfan, Hurler syndrome, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, osteogenesis imperfecta, and pseudoxanthoma elasticum, a peculiar condition in which the skin becomes so stretchy that it can be pulled several inches away from the body. The book established McKusick in the field of clinical genetics.8

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That summer, he brought a talk on the heritable disorders of connective tissue to Copenhagen, where the Danish medical geneticist Tage Kemp presided over the first international congress of human genetics. The 1956 Copenhagen meeting looms large in the mythology of medical genetics, because it occurred at what has become known as the birth of the field. McKusick called it a “very defining experience” in his medical-genetic education. It is a trough in the medical-genetic landscape; events on either side tend to roll mnemonically into the summer of 1956, and Copenhagen gets credit for publicizing and therefore originating them.9

Nearly four hundred delegates attended, and fourteen countries sent national committees to the meeting. The prewar and immediate postwar cohort who had established the heredity clinics and founded the ASHG still dominated the American committee, which included such representatives as Sheldon Reed, Pete Oliver, Eldon Gardner, and Arthur Steinberg. An ambiguous group of respected geneticists with Nazi ties represented Germany: Otmar von Verschuer, Fritz Lenz, and Hans Nachtsheim all sought reintegration into the international genetics community. The British committee included Lionel Penrose, the Galton Professor, and Harry Harris, a biochemical geneticist at London Hospital Medical College, among others. Many Scandinavian medical geneticists attended, of course. Their noncoercive medical eugenics established a model for volunteeristic state control of heredity; several delegates reported on recent efforts to institute genetic registration of infants as an experiment in socialized genetic medicine. The formal government apparatus provided a supporting structure for voluntary eugenics, which scientists such as Kemp deemed not only acceptable but necessary for the responsible stewardship of the race.

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