Yuet Wai Kan
Yuet Wai Kan ( born June 11, 1936 in Hong Kong ) is a hematologist and geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco.
Life
Kan acquired in 1958 from the University of Hong Kong a MB, BS (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery, graduating from medical school ). As a medical assistant, he worked at Queen Mary Hospital in Hong Kong before 1960 as a fellow at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, arrived. 1962/1963 he worked as an assistant doctor at the University of Pittsburgh. Research trips led him to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT ) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, before he became an assistant to David Nathan at the Boston Children's Hospital. There Kan began to deal with hemoglobinopathies.
1970 Kan received a professorship ( Assistant Professor ) at Harvard University. He became head of the Division of Hematology at the San Francisco General Hospital in 1972. From 1976 to 2003 Kan researched in addition for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute ( HHMI ). In 1977 he was appointed professor of internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco ( UCSF ), 1979 of Biochemistry and Biophysics. 1980 acquired Kan even a D.Sc. at the University of Hong Kong. Since 1983, Kan manages the Department of Genetics and Molecular Hematology at UCSF; He is Louis K. Diamond Professor of Hematology.
Kan is a member of the Human Rights Committee ( Committee on Human Rights ) of the National Academies.
Work
Kan is considered a pioneer of DNA analysis for diagnostic purposes. Kan has shown that a single point mutation is sufficient to cause disease for the first time. Together with Mitchell Golbus reach him in 1975 and 1976 for the first time evidence of sickle cell anemia and thalassemia from fetal blood. Kan discovered in 1978 the first DNA polymorphism which today is widely used in genetic analyzes. Published in 1980, Kan, the nucleotide sequence of the gene loci of α - hemoglobin. Recent work dealing with the possibilities of gene therapy in various hemoglobinopathies.