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When geneticist Haig H. Kazazian Jr. was 16, he overheard a conversation between his father and a family friend. “What do you think? Is he going to be a doctor?” asked his father. “I think he’ll be a scientist,” replied the friend. Kazazian went on to become both. Trained in pediatrics, he developed a love of genetics early on and took up research. At first, he focused on blood disorders, with an eye toward characterizing the molecular basis of thalassemia and hemophilia. Then, a discovery in his laboratory on human jumping genes shifted his focus to questions that have taken him on a 30-year journey to understand what mobile pieces of DNA do in the human genome and how they work. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018, Kazazian is Professor of Pediatrics, Molecular Biology, and Genetics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His Inaugural Article (1) reports the search for jumping genes in gastrointestinal tumor cells.
Haig H. Kazazian Jr. Image credit: Courtney J. Barbour.
Fulfilling a Father’s Dreams
Kazazian’s success is all the sweeter because of the hardships his parents endured. They were Armenian immigrants fleeing the Turkish genocide. His mother arrived in Racine, Wisconsin in 1920. His father was the only member of his immediate family to survive life in a concentration camp in northeastern Syria after a forced march from Anatolia. In 1917 his father escaped, via Damascus and Cuba, to Toledo, Ohio, where an uncle owned an oriental rug store. The elder Kazazian, having lost his opportunity for an education, worked alongside his uncle, eventually taking over the business when his uncle died in 1951.
“My father was very smart, and he had wanted to become a physician,” recalls Kazazian. “I feel like I was fulfilling his dreams in the next generation. I wasn’t pressured, …
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