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The Arno and Gretel Motulsky Endowed Trainees Support Fund
Gail P. Jarvik, Fel.’91, the head of the Division of Medical Genetics and holder of the Arno G. Motulsky, M.D., Endowed Professorship, remembers a recent meeting of UW geneticists. Clinical faculty from her division and several other departments were present.
When someone polled the group, asking why those gathered had come to the University of Washington, everyone gave the same answer: Arno G. Motulsky.
“To a person,” says Jarvik, “Arno’s the reason we’re here.”
Emeritus Professor Arno G. Motulsky is a living legend at UW Medicine. A refugee from Nazi Germany, Motulsky endured many hardships during the Second World War: internment in France and forced separation from his family among them. He also was a passenger on the notorious S.S. St. Louis, a ship carrying Jewish refugees to Havana, Cuba — a ship which later returned Motulsky and the other refugees to Europe, as no country would allow them entry. Motulsky’s fortune changed, however, and he managed to secure a visa to the United States; he made his way to Chicago, reunited with his father, and took a job as a student assistant in a hospital laboratory — a job that confirmed his interest in medicine.
Then Motulsky’s medical career began in earnest: night-time pre-med classes, undergraduate work at Yale, medical school at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He was recruited to UW Medicine as a hematology instructor in 1953, and encouraged by Dr. Robert Williams, then the chair of the Department of Medicine, to pursue medical genetics. In the 50-plus years that followed, Motulsky has had a long, illustrious career, including foundational work in blood diseases, heredity-environment interactions in the pathogenesis of disease, and the molecular genetics of color vision.
He’s also touched the lives of many medical geneticists, like Jarvik.
Motulsky, says Jarvik, was one of her mentors. When she first came to the UW as a post-doc, they collaborated on a lipid project, one that continues to this day. And although they work together on a regular basis, the two still make time to meet every month just to chat about science. “He has an amazing world view and has read everything,” says Jarvik.
Jarvik also is inspired by the way Motulsky thinks: he’s always looking ahead, she says. “He looked at pharmacogenetics [genetically determined drug reactions] before anyone did,” says Jarvik, and he was 10 years ahead of the field in looking at color vision genetics and its molecular basis as a model of the genetic variability in perception.
But one of Motulsky’s biggest accomplishments, she says, is the creation of a terrific training program. “UW is clearly the premier program for adult genetic diseases in the country,” says Jarvik. “Arno is a large component of that.”
To honor Motulsky’s dedication to trainees, Jarvik and her husband, Jeffrey G. Jarvik, MPH ’95, whose scientist parents have known Motulsky for decades, used the University’s Faculty-Staff-Retiree Campaign for Students to create the Arno and Gretel Motulsky Endowed Trainees Support Fund. The fund will help trainees bring in speakers to enhance their educational experiences.
The Jarviks have been joined in their effort by Clement E. Furlong, Jr., a scientist with whom Gail Jarvik has collaborated for many years. Like Jarvik, Furlong came to UW Medicine because of Arno Motulsky’s reputation. Motulsky, again ahead of his time, introduced Furlong to ecogenetics in 1977; today, this field, which concerns the interaction of genetics and the environment, remains Furlong’s primary area of research. And like the Jarviks, Furlong, research professor of genome sciences and medicine (medical genetics), created a fund to honor Motulsky.
These contributors like the idea of supporting the division’s trainees — having enough money for training programs is always an issue, says Jarvik — but first and foremost, she and her husband created the fund to honor Arno Motulsky and his wife, Gretel, whose steadfast support facilitated Motulsky’s activities as a mentor.
These donors also hope other people will join them. Jarvik, who has long benefited from her association with Motulsky, encourages her colleagues to consider contributing to the Motulsky Professorship or the Motulsky Trainees Fund — as an investment in the division, and as a tribute to an esteemed faculty member.
“We’re lucky to have Arno,” Jarvik says.
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