Yuet Wai Kan

Yuet Wai Kan (; born June 11, 1936), is a Chinese-American geneticist and hematologist. He is the current Louis K. Diamond Chair in Hematology and a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco. He is a former president of the American Society of Hematology.

Early life and education Kan is of Shunde, Guangdong, descent, and was born in Hong Kong to the prominent Kan family. His father, Tong Po Kan, was a co-founder of Bank of East Asia, Kan is the youngest. Kan's brother, Yuet-keung Kan, was the Senior Unofficial Member of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong and the Executive Council of Hong Kong, and a former chairman of the Bank of East Asia.

Kan started his education at True Light Elementary School, not long before the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during World War II. He entered Wah Yan College, Hong Kong after the war and graduated in 1952. and obtaining his Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery degree in 1958, with a distinction in Social Medicine, Medicine, Surgery and Obstetrics and Gynecology.

The University of Hong Kong awarded Kan a Doctor of Science in 1980. Kan went to the United States in 1960 to work and be trained in various North American institutions. He first went to Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston (now part of Brigham and Women's Hospital) to work and learn hematology under Frank H. Gardner, during which he became interested in research. and then joined Vernon Ingram at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to learn about hemoglobin. He became interested in thalassemia after attending to an infant with alpha-thalassemia. In 1972, Kan went to San Francisco General Hospital to become the Chief of Hematology Service, and was, at the same time, appointed an associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Kan was promoted to full professor in 1977 at the Department of Medicine of UCSF, and was cross-appointed to the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics in 1979.

Kan sat on the President's Committee on the National Medal of Science, which reviews nominations for the award, from 1988 to 1990, and was the president of the American Society of Hematology in 1990. He was also the president of the Society of Chinese Bioscientists in America from 1998 to 1999, and was the chairman of the board of trustees of the Croucher Foundation, Hong Kong, from 1991 to 2011.

In 1993, Kan was appointed to head the newly established Gene Therapy Core Center at UCSF.

Kan has also served on the Committee on Human Rights of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine (now National Academy of Medicine) from 2000 until at least 2008, and was the director of the Institute of Molecular Biology at the University of Hong Kong from 1990 to 1994, which was dissolved in 2005.

Since 1994,

Research Kan is best known for his research in the etiology of thalassemia, and has significant contribution to the prenatal testing of hemoglobinopathy and the research in single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs).

Kan and his collaborators found the deletion of a gene was the cause of alpha-thalassemia, the first demonstration of its kind for any disease. His 1979 report on the cause of beta-thalassemia established the disease-causing ability of SNPs, where he found that a nonsense mutation, a type of point mutation, led to the truncation of the beta chains of hemoglobin.

In prenatal testing research, he discovered, in 1972, that hemoglobin protein chains could be isolated from fetal blood, and the presence of abnormal hemoglobin chains signified sickle cell disease, allowing for the detection of the disease before birth. Then, building on his finding that alpha-thalassemia was caused by a gene deletion, he designed a DNA-based test for the deletion, the first time a DNA test was used for diagnosing a human condition. suggesting an indirect diagnostic method for the disease and marking the first use of SNPs in genetic linkage analysis of human diseases.

Personal life Kan married Alvera Limauro in 1964 in Boston. and 5 grandchildren. Henry M. Stratton Medal, American Society of Hematology (1980) George Thorn Award, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (1980) Fellow of the Royal Society (1981) (the first person of Chinese descent to be elected) William Allan Award (1984) Lita Annenberg Hazen Award for Excellence in Clinical Research (1984) Canada Gairdner International Award (1984) Member of the National Academy of Sciences (1986) Member of the Third World Academy of Sciences (1986) Waterford Biomedical Science Award (1987) Member of Academia Sinica (1988) Harriet P. Dustan Award (now Harriet P. Dustan Award for Science as Related to Medicine), American College of Physicians (1988) Warren Alpert Foundation Prize (1989) Sanremo International Prize for Genetic Research (1989) Christopher Columbus Discovery Award in Biomedical Research, National Institutes of Health (1991) City of Medicine Award, Durham, North Carolina (1992) Helmut Horten Research Award (1995) Foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (1996) Shaw Prize in Life Science & Medicine (2004) Lifetime Achievement Award, Society of Chinese Bioscientists in America (2006) Member of the National Academy of Medicine (then Institute of Medicine) (2011) Fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research Academy (2013) Precision Medicine World Conference Pioneer Award (2014) William S. McEllroy Distinguished Resident Award, University of Pittsburgh (2015)