Arno Motulsky

Arno Motulsky was born in Fischhausen near Königsberg, East Prussia The police traced the letter to him and he served time in prison for his dissidence. Hermann was later pressured by the mayor of Fischhausen to sell his store and other property at undervalued prices to an “Aryan” buyer. The family relocated to Hamburg, living off savings as they explored how and when to emigrate. In June 1938, Hermann was arrested again as part of the Juni-Aktion, a precursor to Kristallnacht. He was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp for two months and released on the condition that he leave Germany. He was forced to emigrate without his family in October 1938, bound for Cuba. At age 15 in 1939 Arno along with his mother and younger siblings, already on a waiting list for a visa to enter US, obtained a landing permit to join his father in Cuba. With more than 900 other Jewish refugees, the family embarked on the ship the MS St. Louis from Hamburg to Havana, The captain then asked to land in a US port with the refugees, but the US government refused them entry, Days before his 18th birthday, he was able to arrange to leave France in June 1941 bearing an American visa. He disembarked from Lisbon for the United States, where he arrived in August 1941 and reunited with his father in Chicago. Two years later, Motulsky and his father learned that the remainder of their immediate family were in Switzerland, unharmed. The family was reunited in Chicago in 1946, and changed their surname to Molton: only Arno retained the original family name. Motulsky met Gretel Stern (born in 1924, also from Germany) in 1943. They married in 1945. == Education ==

Motulsky had been barred from his primary education in Germany in 1938 due to his Jewish ancestry, and only attended a year of high school in Belgium before the German invasion, but he maintained his studies during his internment and was able to pass high school equivalency tests in America in 1942. Over the next 2 years, he was able to obtain college qualifications by attending classes at night and on Saturdays while working during the week. He was accepted to medical school at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1943, but was drafted by the U.S. Army. He attended Yale University as part of the U.S. Army accelerated program, where he attended a genetics course taught by Donald Poulson and "was hooked forever". Motulsky briefly served as an orderly at an army hospital before enrolling in medical school at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He earned his medical doctorate in 3 years, in 1947. Motulsky subsequently completed his residency in medicine and fellowship in hematology at the University of Illinois. == Career ==

Motulsky's first research efforts were conducted under the supervision of Karl Singer at the Michael Reese Hospital, where he investigated hemoglobinopathies. At the request of the chair of the department, Motulsky established the Division of Medical Genetics in 1957. which his group was the first to practically demonstrate by using transplantation to cure hereditary spherocytosis in a murine model in 1967. and provided the first evidence that familial hypercholesterolemia was a monogenic disorder. These were also foundational studies for Goldstein's 1985 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded with Michael Brown, “for their discoveries concerning the regulation of cholesterol metabolism.” During the course of his career, Motulsky mentored many postdoctoral trainees in medical genetics, including Robert Sparks, John Mulvihill, Philip J. Fialkow, Charles Epstein, Frederick Hecht, David E. Comings, Judith Goslin Hall, Gilbert S. Omenn, George Stamatoyannopoulos, George Fraser, Wylie Burke, Ephrat Levy-Lahad, and Joseph L. Goldstein. Many of these trainees went on to establish genetics programs at a number of medical schools. == Legacy ==

When he was 19, Motulsky wrote a short memoir (in English) of his experiences from 1939 to 1941, and this was published after his death. He also discussed his experiences in a -hour interview with the USC Shoah Foundation, Much of this memoir was based on an interview done as part of the Conversations in Genetics series. Obituaries were published in the New York Times, American Journal of Human Genetics, American Journal of Medical Genetics, Genetics in Medicine, the Journal of Clinical investigation, the Lancet, the Scientist, the Pharmacologist, the British Journal of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, and UW Medicine. He was inducted as a member into the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. ==References==