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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 pharmacogenomics", and is credited with coining the term.2
As the Nazism consolidated power and adopted Antisemitism 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. (2010). 9780300118032 ISBN 9780300118032 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 Aryanization. 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, (2026). 9783593398235, Campus. ISBN 9783593398235Dirks, 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. . OCLC 317922748. pp. 22-33. 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.
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 Pharmacogenomics 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 Genetic disorder 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.
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.
He was inducted as a member into the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
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