Mark Skolnick

Early life and education He was born in 1946 in Temple, Texas, and earned his B.A. at University of California at Berkeley in 1968 and a Ph.D at Stanford University in 1975. His father taught a clinical post graduate course in psychoanalysis at Stanford, where Skolnick was introduced to the bright Stanford academics at a very young age. “It got put into my head pretty early on that medicine was interesting,” says Skolnick, “but it might be more interesting to be an academic than a doctor. I’m not sure I would have wanted to just focus on seeing ill people.” Skolnick was very good at math but his parents also played a very significant role cultivating his interest in science and in societal causes. “I think I was driven a lot by actually wanting to do something of lasting social significance,” he said.

He directed the group that cloned the breast cancer susceptibility gene, BRCA1; found the full-length sequence of BRCA2.

Discovery of BRCAl and BRCA2 genes

Connecting Demography with Genetics: According to Skolnick, "the first scientific step in my search of the BRCA gene arose from my interest in demography, the study of human populations. The standard wisdom in the 1960s was that this was small field that should be studied within the contrast of sociology or economics." He used the demography and applied to genetics and studied individual in multi-generational families.

Secondly, he was instrumental in forming a familial cancer screening clinic. Skolnick and his colleagues used this clinic to study a number of people in different families with different types of cancers. As Skolnick states, “ This resources was a key to our success”

Awards Skolnick was elected a Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association in 1990.