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Arno Gunther Motulsky (5 July 1923 – 17 January 2018) was a professor of medical genetics and genome sciences at the University of Washington. Motulsky is considered a founder of the field of medical genetics. He is also considered the "father of pharmacogenetics", and is credited with coining the term.

Early life

Arno Motulsky was born in Fischhausen near Königsberg, East Prussia to German-Jewish parents, Hermann and Rena (Sass) Motulsky.

As the Nazis consolidated power and adopted antisemitic laws, Arno's father Hermann, a merchant, attempted to resist. Offended by the public display in the town square of Der Stürmer, the virulently antisemitic pro-Nazi newspaper, he forged a letter to the local Nazi Party branch directing them to remove the Stürmer display boxes. The police traced the letter to him and he served time in prison for his dissidence. Hermann was later pressured by the mayor of Fischhausen to sell his store and other property at undervalued prices to an “Aryan” buyer. The family relocated to Hamburg, living off savings as they explored how and when to emigrate.

In June 1938, Hermann was arrested again as part of the Juni-Aktion, a precursor to Kristallnacht. He was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp for two months and released on the condition that he leave Germany. He was forced to emigrate without his family in October 1938, bound for Cuba.

At age 15 in 1939 Arno along with his mother and younger siblings, already on a waiting list for a visa to enter US, obtained a landing permit to join his father in Cuba. With more than 900 other Jewish refugees, the family embarked on the ship the MS St. Louis from Hamburg to Havana,

Along with most other passengers, the Motulskys’ permit to enter Cuba was fraudulently sold by corrupt officials, and Cuba did not allow the refugees to disembark. The captain then asked to land in a US port with the refugees, but the US government refused them entry, as did Canada and other Western Hemisphere nations. The St. Louis was forced to head back towards Germany. A few days before the ship was to land again in Hamburg, four countries agreed to take the refugees. By lots, the passengers were divided among England, France, Belgium, and Netherlands. Arno's family was sent to Belgium in June 1939.

The Germans invaded Belgium on May 10, 1940, and 16-year-old Arno was arrested by the Belgians for being a German ‘‘enemy alien.’’ He was separated from his family and spent a year in various internment camps at Saint-Cyprien, Pyrénées-Orientales and Gurs in southwestern France. Days before his 18th birthday, he was able to arrange to leave France in June 1941 bearing an American visa. He disembarked from Lisbon for the United States, where he arrived in August 1941 and reunited with his father in Chicago.

Two years later, Motulsky and his father learned that the remainder of their immediate family were in Switzerland, unharmed. The family was reunited in Chicago in 1946, and changed their surname to Molton: only Arno retained the original family name.

Motulsky met Gretel Stern (born in 1924, also from Germany) in 1943. They married in 1945.

Education

Motulsky had been barred from his primary education in Germany in 1938 due to his Jewish ancestry, and only attended a year of high school in Belgium before the German invasion, but he maintained his studies during his internment and was able to pass high school equivalency tests in America in 1942. Over the next 2 years, he was able to obtain college qualifications by attending classes at night and on Saturdays while working during the week. He was accepted to medical school at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1943, but was drafted by the U.S. Army. He attended Yale University as part of the U.S. Army accelerated program, where he attended a genetics course taught by Donald Poulson and "was hooked forever". Motulsky briefly served as an orderly at an army hospital before enrolling in medical school at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He earned his medical doctorate in 3 years, in 1947. Motulsky subsequently completed his residency in medicine and fellowship in hematology at the University of Illinois.

Career

Motulsky's first research efforts were conducted under the supervision of Karl Singer at the Michael Reese Hospital, where he investigated hemoglobinopathies. Subsequent work involved inherited blood disorders, which he conducted at Walter Reed Army Medical Center 1951 to 1953 during service in the U.S. Army.

In 1953, Motulsky joined the faculty of the department of medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine, where he continued his work on hemoglobiopathies, developing the first techniques for hemoglobin electrophoresis. At the request of the chair of the department, Motulsky established the Division of Medical Genetics in 1957. Recruited by Motulsky that same year, Stanley Gartler became the first person to join the division.

Motulsky's work spanned multiple subject areas he believed would benefit from genetic investigation. Among others, his professional interests were diverse and included studying the genetics of human blood and serum groups, biochemical genetics, the genetics of Werner syndrome, Mendelian and cytogenetic causes of birth defects, ecogenetics, multifactorial diseases, the genetics of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency, genetic variation in color vision, genetic variation as a risk factor in anesthesia, and the genetics of pesticide metabolism.

In 1957, Motulsky demonstrated that the differential response seen in drug-induced prolonged apnea during suxamethonium anesthesia could be attributed to a pseudocholinesterase deficiency genoytpe. This discovery led him to propose the concept of pharmacogenetics in 1964.

Motulsky was the first to propose that bone marrow transplantation could be used to cure genetic disorders of the hematopoietic system, which his group was the first to practically demonstrate by using transplantation to cure hereditary spherocytosis in a murine model in 1967.

Starting in 1970, Motulsky mentored his trainee Joseph L. Goldstein in investigations of the genetic variability of lipid metabolism. This collaboration led to discovery of the familial inheritance patterns of hyperlipidemia, and provided the first evidence that familial hypercholesterolemia was a monogenic disorder. These were also foundational studies for Goldstein's 1985 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded with Michael Brown, “for their discoveries concerning the regulation of cholesterol metabolism.”

During the 1980's Motulsky collaborated with colleague Samir Deeb to investigate the genetics underlying color vision, eventually identifying common genetic polymorphisms and structural variants that influence color perception.

During the course of his career, Motulsky mentored many postdoctoral trainees in medical genetics, including Robert Sparks, John Mulvihill, Philip J. Fialkow, Charles Epstein, Frederick Hecht, David E. Comings, Judith Goslin Hall, Gilbert S. Omenn, George Stamatoyannopoulos, George Fraser, Wylie Burke, Ephrat Levy-Lahad, and Joseph L. Goldstein. Many of these trainees went on to establish genetics programs at a number of medical schools.

Legacy

When he was 19, Motulsky wrote a short memoir (in English) of his experiences from 1939 to 1941, and this was published after his death. He also discussed his experiences in a 2+1⁄2-hour interview with the USC Shoah Foundation, as well as a series of interviews with Deutschlandradio. In 2012, Motulsky was honored in a ceremony by the US State Department for the survivors of the MS St. Louis and diplomats from countries that accepted them as refugees.

He co-wrote his final publication, his autobiography, with Mary-Claire King. Much of this memoir was based on an interview done as part of the Conversations in Genetics series. Obituaries were published in the New York Times, American Journal of Human Genetics, American Journal of Medical Genetics, Genetics in Medicine, the Journal of Clinical investigation, the Lancet, the Scientist, the Pharmacologist, the British Journal of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, and UW Medicine.

References

1. "Gretel Motulsky". The Seattle Times. September 20, 2009.
2. "In memoriam: Arno Motulsky - Department of Medicine - University of Washington". medicine.uw.edu. Archived from the original on 21 January 2018. Retrieved 21 January 2018.
3. ^ Denise, Grady (2018-01-29). "Arno Motulsky, a Founder of Medical Genetics, Dies at 94". The New York Times. Retrieved 2018-03-09.
4. ^ Jarvik, Gail P. (May 2018). "Arno G. Motulsky, MD (1923–2018): Holocaust survivor who cofounded the field of medical genetics". Genetics in Medicine. 20 (5): 477–479. doi:10.1038/gim.2018.55. ISSN 1098-3600. PMID 29688222. S2CID 5039251.
5. ^ Jarvik, Gail (2018). "Arno G. Motulsky (1923–2018): A Founder of Medical Genetics, Creator of Pharmacogenetics, and Former ASHG President" (PDF). American Journal of Human Genetics. 102 (3): 335–339. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2018.02.005.
6. ^ Opitz, John M. (June 2018). "Arno G. Motulsky, 1923-2018, Luck and Service". American Journal of Medical Genetics. Part A. 176 (6): 1285–1288. doi:10.1002/ajmg.a.38702. ISSN 1552-4833. PMID 29696759. S2CID 13794742.
7. Dreifus, Claudia (29 April 2008). "A Genetics Pioneer Sees a Bright Future, Cautiously". The New York Times.
8. ^ Motulsky, A. G. (1964). "PHARMACOGENETICS". Progress in Medical Genetics. 23: 49–74. ISSN 0079-6441. PMID 14110077.
9. ^ Roehr, Bob (2018-02-28). "Arno Motulsky: Father of pharmacogenetics". BMJ. 360: k884. doi:10.1136/bmj.k884. ISSN 0959-8138. S2CID 79875691.
10. ^ Dr. Arno Motulsky - March 6, 2012, 17 March 2020, retrieved 2023-09-13
11. ^ Motulsky, Arno G.; King, Mary-Claire (2016-08-31). "The Great Adventure of an American Human Geneticist". Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics. 17 (1): 1–15. doi:10.1146/annurev-genom-083115-022528. ISSN 1527-8204. PMID 27147253.
12. The Jews in the secret Nazi reports on popular opinion in Germany, 1933-1945. Kulka, Otto Dov,, Jäckel, Eberhard,, Templer, William (English ed.). New Haven. 2 November 2010. ISBN 978-0-300-11803-2. OCLC 691910480.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: others (link)
13. Die "Juni-Aktion" 1938 : Eine Dokumentation zur Radikalisierung der Judenverfolgung. Faludi, Christian (1., neue Ausg ed.). Frankfurt am Main: Campus. 2013. ISBN 978-3-593-39823-5. OCLC 830931619.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
14. Dirks, Christian (2009). "The Juni-Aktion in Berlin.” In Meyer, Beate, Hermann Simon, Chana Schütz (eds.). Jews in Nazi Berlin: From Kristallnacht to Liberation. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-52157-2. OCLC 317922748. pp. 22-33.
15. Miller, Scott (2006). Refuge Denied: The St. Louis Passengers and the Holocaust. Univ. Wisconsin Press. ISBN 978-0-299-21980-2.
16. ^ Oransky, Ivan; Marcus, Adam (June 2018). "Arno Motulsky". The Lancet. 391 (10136): 2207. doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(18)31167-x. ISSN 0140-6736. S2CID 54324299.
17. Bervoets-Tragholz, Marcel. (2006). La liste de Saint-Cyprien : l'odyssée de plusieurs milliers de juifs expulsés le 10 mai 1940 par les autorités belges vers les camps d'internement du sud de la France, antichambre des camps d'extermination. Bruxelles: Alice Editions. ISBN 2-87426-044-4. OCLC 173684472.
18. Motulsky, A. G.; Paul, M. H.; Durrum, E. L. (September 1954). "Paper electrophoresis of abnormal hemoglobins and its clinical applications; a simple semiquantitative method for the study of the hereditary hemoglobinopathies". Blood. 9 (9): 897–910. doi:10.1182/blood.V9.9.897.897. ISSN 0006-4971. PMID 13189919.
19. Jarvik, Gail P. (2017-03-02). "2016 Victor A. McKusick Leadership Award Introduction: Stanley Gartler". American Journal of Human Genetics. 100 (3): 401–402. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2017.01.012. ISSN 1537-6605. PMC 5339076. PMID 28257688.
20. ^ "Arno G. Motulsky Biographical Memoir" (PDF). Retrieved 2023-09-14.
21. Motulsky, A. G. (1957-10-19). "Drug reactions enzymes, and biochemical genetics". Journal of the American Medical Association. 165 (7): 835–837. doi:10.1001/jama.1957.72980250010016. ISSN 0002-9955. PMID 13462859.
22. Motulsky, A. G.; Anderson, R.; Sparkes, R. S.; Huestis, R. H. (1962). "Marrow transplantation in newborn mice with hereditary spherocytosis: a model system". Transactions of the Association of American Physicians. 75: 64–72. ISSN 0066-9458. PMID 13936283.
23. Steinmuller, D.; Motulsky, A. G. (March 1967). "Treatment of hereditary spherocytosis in Peromyscus by radiation and allogeneic bone marrow transplantation". Blood. 29 (3): 320–330. doi:10.1182/blood.V29.3.320.320. ISSN 0006-4971. PMID 5335711.
24. Goldstein, J. L.; Hazzard, W. R.; Schrott, H. G.; Bierman, E. L.; Motulsky, A. G. (1972). "Genetics of hyperlipidemia in coronary heart disease". Transactions of the Association of American Physicians. 85: 120–138. ISSN 0066-9458. PMID 4349620.
25. Schrott, H. G.; Goldstein, J. L.; Hazzard, W. R.; McGoodwin, M. M.; Motulsky, A. G. (May 1972). "Familial hypercholesterolemia in a large indred. Evidence for a monogenic mechanism". Annals of Internal Medicine. 76 (5): 711–720. doi:10.7326/0003-4819-76-5-711. ISSN 0003-4819. PMID 5025321.
26. Winderickx, J.; Lindsey, D. T.; Sanocki, E.; Teller, D. Y.; Motulsky, A. G.; Deeb, S. S. (1992-04-02). "Polymorphism in red photopigment underlies variation in colour matching". Nature. 356 (6368): 431–433. Bibcode:1992Natur.356..431W. doi:10.1038/356431a0. ISSN 0028-0836. PMID 1557123. S2CID 4362230.
27. Hayashi, T.; Motulsky, A. G.; Deeb, S. S. (May 1999). "Position of a 'green-red' hybrid gene in the visual pigment array determines colour-vision phenotype". Nature Genetics. 22 (1): 90–93. doi:10.1038/8798. ISSN 1061-4036. PMID 10319869. S2CID 1326234.
28. Motulsky, Arno G. (2018-04-26). "A German-Jewish refugee in Vichy France 1939-1941. Arno Motulsky's memoir of life in the internment camps at St. Cyprien and Gurs". American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A. 176 (6): 1289–1295. doi:10.1002/ajmg.a.38701. ISSN 1552-4825. PMC 6001526. PMID 29697901.
29. Motulsky, Arno. "Arno Motulsky Shoah Foundation Testimony". YouTube.
30. "Arno Motulsky (Human Disease, Pharmacogenetics)". YouTube. 15 March 2015.
31. Opitz, John M. (2018-04-25). "Arno G. Motulsky, 1923-2018, Luck and Service". American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A. 176 (6): 1285–1288. doi:10.1002/ajmg.a.38702. ISSN 1552-4825. PMID 29696759. S2CID 13794742.
32. Jarvik, Gail P (2018-05-01). "Arno G. Motulsky, MD (1923–2018): Holocaust survivor who cofounded the field of medical genetics". Genetics in Medicine. 20 (5): 477–479. doi:10.1038/gim.2018.55. ISSN 1098-3600. PMID 29688222.
33. Stamatoyannopoulos, George (2018-04-16). "A tribute to Arno Motulsky". Journal of Clinical Investigation. 128 (5): 1709–1710. doi:10.1172/jci121197. ISSN 0021-9738. PMC 5919826. PMID 29664019.
34. "Father of Pharmacogenetics Dies". The Scientist Magazine. Retrieved 2018-07-13.
35. "The Pharmacologist June 2018". issuu. 26 June 2018. Retrieved 2018-07-13.
36. Gartler, Stanley M.; Jarvik, Gail P. (November 21, 2019). "Arno G. Motulsky, a biographical memoir" (PDF). National Academy of Sciences.
37. "Honoring Arno - UW Medicine Magazine". UW Medicine Magazine. 2018-05-21. Retrieved 2018-06-01.

External links

• Arno Motulsky at Find a Grave

• 1923 births
• 2018 deaths
• People from Primorsk, Kaliningrad Oblast
• People from East Prussia
• American geneticists
• Medical geneticists
• Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United States
• Gurs internment camp survivors
• American Journal of Human Genetics editors
• Members of the National Academy of Medicine
• Yale University alumni