Arno Motulsky

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. 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, The captain then asked to land in a US port with the refugees, but the US government refused them entry, Days before his 18th birthday, he was able to arrange to leave France in June 1941 bearing an American visa. At the request of the chair of the department, Motulsky established the Division of Medical Genetics in 1957. which his group was the first to practically demonstrate by using transplantation to cure hereditary spherocytosis in a murine model in 1967. 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.” He also discussed his experiences in a -hour interview with the USC Shoah Foundation, 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.