Ashg Awards and Addresses

It is a great pleasure and privilege to introduce Stuart Orkin, the 2014 recipient of the William Allan Award, the highest honor of our society. Orkin’s research is unmatched for its cumulative impact on the genetic basis of blood diseases and fundamental aspects of mammalian development. His work is a paradigm for the application of molecular genetics to medicine. Stu was born to native New Yorkers and grew up in Manhattan. His father was a urologist who made house calls. When Stu was in the fourth grade, the family moved to Riverdale, where he attended a private boys’ school. At Riverdale, he had a chemistry teacher who stimulated him to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After flirting with physics, he quickly learned that MIT had many physics whizzes, so after Salvador Luria’s biology course on early molecular genetics, he decided to pursue biology. Stu then began attending Harvard Medical School in 1967, and around 1970 he took a year of research with John Littlefield to do somatic cell genetics. After the NIH paid for his fourth year in medical school, he did an internship at Boston Children’s Hospital. He then went to the NIH to work with Phil Leder, an esteemed molecular geneticist. What a great deal and terrific mentor he had! With Leder, Orkin learned pre-cloning molecular biology. Around this time, I met him for the first time and was quite impressed. After his time at the NIH, he returned to Boston Children’s Hospital for a residency year, and David