Kurt Hirschhorn

Kurt R. Hirschhorn ( born May 18, 1926 in Vienna) is an American geneticist Austrian origin. According to him and Ulrich Wolf the Wolf- Hirschhorn syndrome was named.

Life

Hirschhorn was born on 18 May 1926 as the son of Emanuel Hirschhorn and his wife Helen ( née Mayberger ) in Vienna. Because of the Jewish ancestors of his father left the family after the Anschluss in 1938, the home via Switzerland and England to the United States.

After three months stay in New York, the family moved to Pittsburgh, where Kurt Hirschhorn in high school and then moved to the University of Pittsburgh. Following his military service Hirschhorn moved back to New York to continue his studies resumed, obtained in 1950 at the New York University BA cum laude in 1954 and the MD degree from New York University School of Medicine.

Hirschhorn was married and has three children.

Work

After a stay at the Institute of Human Genetics at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, here Hirschhorn worked from 1954 among others with Marco Fraccaro together, he ran from 1958, back in New York, a Department of Genetics. Until the Mitter -1960s his research group grew to fourteen members.

1966 Deer Horn was appointed professor of pediatrics, the doctrine of the development of the child and adolescent organism, at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Awards

In 1995, Hirschhorn the William Allan Award. In 2006 he was honored by the March of Dimes Colonel Harland Sanders with the award for his life's work in the field of genetics. Also in 2006 he received the John Howland Award of the American Pediatric Society.

The Wolf -Hirschhorn syndrome (also known as chromosome 4p - syndrome) is a rare congenital genetic disorder. Symptom is a short stature associated with an extreme delay in mental and physical development as well as a combination of different malformations. It is named after Ulrich Wolf and Kurt Hirschhorn, who described the disease in 1965 independently of each other for the first time.