22 Facts About Arno Motulsky

Arno Gunther Motulsky was a professor of medical genetics and genome sciences at the University of Washington.

Arno Motulsky is considered the "father of pharmacogenetics", and is credited with coining the term.

Arno Motulsky was born in Fischhausen near Konigsberg, East Prussia to German-Jewish parents, Hermann and Rena Motulsky.

Arno Motulsky was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp for two months and released on the condition that he leave Germany.

Arno Motulsky was forced to emigrate without his family in October 1938, bound for Cuba.

Arno Motulsky disembarked from Lisbon for the United States, where he arrived in August 1941 and reunited with his father in Chicago.

The family was reunited in Chicago in 1946, and changed their surname to Molton: only Arno Motulsky retained the original family name.

Arno 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.

Arno Motulsky was accepted to medical school at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1943, but was drafted by the US Army.

Arno Motulsky attended Yale University as part of the US Army accelerated program, where he attended a genetics course taught by Donald Poulson and "was hooked forever".

Arno Motulsky briefly served as an orderly at an army hospital before enrolling in medical school at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Arno Motulsky earned his medical doctorate in 3 years, in 1947.

Arno Motulsky subsequently completed his residency in medicine and fellowship in hematology at the University of Illinois.

In 1953, Arno 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, Arno Motulsky established the Division of Medical Genetics in 1957.

Arno Motulsky's work spanned multiple subject areas he believed would benefit from genetic investigation.

In 1957, Arno Motulsky demonstrated that the differential response seen in drug-induced prolonged apnea during suxamethonium anesthesia could be attributed to a pseudocholinesterase deficiency genoytpe.

Arno 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.

When he was 19, Arno Motulsky wrote a short memoir of his experiences from 1939 to 1941, and this was published after his death.

In 2012, Arno 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.

Arno Motulsky co-wrote his final publication, his autobiography, with Mary-Claire King.

Arno Motulsky was inducted as a member into the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.