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Frederick Hecht

Born  1930
Died  

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American paediatrician and medical geneticist, born 1930, Baltimore, Maryland.

Biography of Frederick Hecht

Frederick Hecht Frederick Hecht graduated from Baltimore Friends School in 1948 and received his BA degree with honours in French from Dartmouth College in 1952. After graduate studies he served as interpreter translator in Russian and German in the US Army.

Following discharge from the Army in 1955 he attended Boston University and studied medicine at the the University of Rochester, obtaining his MD with distinction in 1960. He was a paediatric resident at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester from 1960 to 1962, and a postdoctoral research fellow and assistant in medical genetics and paediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle from 1962 to 1965. From 1965 to 1978 he was co-director of the Genetics Clinic at the University of Oregon Medical School (now the Oregon Health Sciences University) in Portland. Due to a shortage of space, Hecht shared a small office with orthopaedic surgeon Rodney Kenneth Beals and from their proximity as office mates came their collaboration in clinical research

In 1978 Hecht moved from his post as Professor in Oregon and, with his wife Barbara Kaiser McCaw, founded the Southwest Biomedical Research Institute in Arizona. (Dr. Kaiser McCaw described the specific chromosome abnormality, a balanced reciprocal translocation between chromosomes 8 and 14, that is the basis for Burkitt's lymphoma.)

Hecht served as Editor-in-Chief of Medterms Medical Dictionary and Associate Chief Editor of MedicineNet.com.

His oldest son Frederick M. ("Rick") Hecht is Professor of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. He is active in AIDS research, teaching and clinical care at San Francisco General Hospital, and was the first to describe multiple-protease resistant HIV.

We thank Frederick Hecht for correcting errors in the original entry and for supplying further information.

Bibliography

  • Frederick Hecht, Herman E. Wyandt, and R. Ellen Heath Magenis:
    The Human Cell Nucleus: Quinacrine and Other Differential Stains in the Study of Chromatin and Chromosomes.
    The Cell Nucleus, Chapter 14, Volume 1, New York, 1974.

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