Victor McKusick and Success
Geneticist and Author uses Desirable Difficulties and Grit to Change the Way Patients are Diagnosed
By: Grace Perrenoud | Biology Major
Victor McKusick walked into the stale office to disapproving looks from his peers. Whispers of “professional suicide” and “it’s a shame, he has so much talent” filled the room with judgment like a pitcher fills a glass of water. McKusick just announced he was leaving a successful career in cardiology to do research about something nobody really cares about, to go into a field that no one really believes in: genetics (U.S. National Library of Medicine).
McKusick always told his students, “if you want to get on top of a topic, you need to learn its course of development.” So, how did Victor McKusick use opportunities in his early life to develop him into the father of medical genetics, a founder of the Human Genome Project, and a brilliant physician and medical educator (Altman)? In Outliers: The Story of Success, journalist Malcolm Gladwell addresses people who are successful with the hand they have been dealt in writing, “Outliers are those who have been given opportunities — and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them” (267). Victor McKusick’s success in the field of genetics and DNA stems from Gladwell’s theories about desirable difficulties, demographic luck, and grit.
As Victor McKusick grew up, he always had his eyes set on being a minister. That dream lasted about fifteen years until he was sent to the Massachusetts General Hospital for an infection on his right arm. McKusick spent ten hot weeks there during the summer of 1937 receiving sulfonamide antibiotics. When reflecting on that period of illness McKusick says, “In the process, I saw much of medicine and decided that it was the field for me.” (Oransky)
For a fifteen-year-old boy, or really anyone, being trapped inside a hospital during summer vacation is not desirable. Malcolm Gladwell shares the story of Joe Flom, who spent a large portion of his career doing undesirable work that larger firms didn’t want to take like litigations and hostile takeovers. Flom faced this difficulty because of his Jewish ethnicity. However, when the 1970s rolled around, there was a shift in the economy. Suddenly, the amount of money in mergers and purchases every year on Wall Street increased 2,000%. Gladwell explains the advantages of this shift:
All of the sudden the things that the old-line law firms didn’t want to do — hostile takeovers and litigations — were the things every law firm wanted to do. And who was the expert in these two suddenly critical areas of law? The once marginal, second-tier law firms started by people who couldn’t get jobs at the downtown firms ten and fifteen years earlier (128).
Because of Joe Flom’s early exposure to this type of work he was able to be an expert in the field and became very successful in law.
Gladwell describes these adversities as desirable difficulties. Without Victor McKusick’s health complications, he wouldn’t have been stuck in a hospital for ten weeks to see the ins and outs of the healthcare system and decide that it was the field for him. He then wouldn’t have made extreme advances in the genetics field. If Joe Flom wasn’t forced to do the nitty-gritty work that the downtown firms didn’t want to do, he wouldn’t have mastered the techniques to one day be a highly successful lawyer. McKusick’s arm infection was a desirable difficulty that led him into the field of medicine.
In 1943, as World War II raged across the world, Victor McKusick left the library at Tufts University in Massachusetts after another late night of solving chemistry and biology schoolwork. On his way out, he checked his mailbox to find a small white letter from John Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore. As McKusick read the letter, he was congratulated on his hard work in his undergraduate studies. John Hopkins explained to him the physician shortage America was having because of the war and offered him early acceptance into their medical school. McKusick was able to receive his medical degree in just three years and was ready to jump into the specialty of general practice back in Massachusetts when he won the Osler Medical Service internship. This scholarship paid for McKusick’s medical school as long he specialized in internal medicine and cardiology. McKusick entered the program, giving him the opportunity to work with the head honchos of John Hopkins, and because of those relationships, he was offered the prestigious position as chief of the cardiology unit (U.S. National Library of Medicine).
McKusick was practicing cardiology in Baltimore when a teenage patient named Harold Parker with striking melanin spots on his lips and a long history of intestinal polyps came to his clinic. McKusick saw multiple cases of this polyps-and-spots syndrome, three being from the same family. He knew there was more than meets the eye and contacted Harold Jephers, another physician who had reported five similar cases. Together they concluded that one mutant gene was causing these effects. This case sparked McKusick’s interest in genetics (U.S. National Library of Medicine).
Without the shortage of physicians during wartime, McKusick wouldn’t have been admitted early into John Hopkins Medical School. Had he not been offered the Osler Medical Service internship, he wouldn’t have stuck around Baltimore where he ran into the patients with the spots and polyps. Malcolm Gladwell calls breaks like this demographic luck.
He gives the example of a study conducted by Lewis Terman. Terman studied a group of children he named “Termites,” and followed their career success throughout life. He looked specifically at when the Termites were born and split them into two groups. Gladwell explains, “If you were born after 1912 — say 1915 — you got out of college after the worst of the Depression was over, and you were drafted at a young enough age that going away to war for three or four years was as much of an opportunity as it was a disruption.”(131)
Whereas the Termites that were born before 1911 “graduated from college at the height of the Depression, when job opportunities were scarce, and they were already in their late thirties when the Second World War hit, meaning that when they were drafted, they had to disrupt careers and families and adult lives that were already well underway” (Gladwell 132). The time the Termites were born was essential to their success in life, similar to how the time McKusick was earning his undergraduate degree was essential to him getting early acceptance into medical school. If he has graduated just a year later, he wouldn’t have treated Harold Parker as a patient and may never have entered the field of genetics.
Butterflies dance in Victor McKusick stomach as he rushes down the hall at the Hauge in the Netherlands to get to a meeting. He walks into the conference room and after greetings and introductions are made, he announces it is time to start mapping the human genome in order to get a better understanding of birth defects. Scientists had mapped the genome of various plants and mice, but now it was time for the real challenge. The room went quiet and McKusick’s colleagues looked at him with blank expressions. In 1969, the idea of mapping the whole entire human genome was a daunting, seemingly impossible task. “In part, the proposal reflected the exuberant mindset that followed the first moon landing by Apollo 11,” McKusick says when reflecting on his proposal (McKusick). McKusick dedicated the majority of the rest of his career to this task. Along the way, he started the Human Genome Organization, which allowed scientist across the world to contribute to his findings. He finally completed mapping the whole entire human genome, all 20,000 genes, in 2003 (Lawrence).
In the movie Moneyball, former professional player and scout for the Oakland Athletics’ Billy Beane along with the help of Yale graduate Paul DePodesta decided that the time was ripe to change how baseball recruits were chosen. No one understood or believed in what they were doing, but they were amazed to see the Athletics record-breaking season after using Beane’s methods (Moneyball). Both Victor McKusick and Billy Beane saw what needed to be done to achieve success in their fields. And to achieve those goals, they needed to not only do what no one else wanted to but they also needed to work their tails off. Their achievements would have been impossible without grit.
During George Bush’s midterm election campaign, he took a trip to Woodbridge to speak about his No Child Left Behind policy. “There’s an achievement gap in America that’s not good for the future of this country. Some kids can read at grade level, and some can’t. And that’s unsatisfactory,” Bush said (Tough). Gladwell tells the true story of students at KIPP Academy. A school in the Bronx created especially for inner-city kids to receive a different education than they would at the public schools. And, with the right amount of hard work and grit, hopefully, get out of the Bronx and into college one day. The children at KIPP academy receive 50–60% more learning than the average school. They accomplish this by starting school at seven twenty-five in the morning every day and ending at five at night. This obviously causes kids to be restless by the end of the day, so David Levin says the kids know what the words self-control and more importantly grit mean (Gladwell 260–261). Similar to Billy Beane and Victor McKusick, KIPP academy kids are able to overcome the odds that most kids who live in the Bronx face with a lot of hard work and grit.
Victor McKusick waited at stage left to receive the Albert Lasker Award for Special Achievement in Medical Science. He sported a black tux and bow tie paired with his round wire glasses and usual smile. The presenter of the award boasted of McKusick’s successes and “recognizes his lifelong career as a founder of the discipline of medical genetics, a pioneer in human gene mapping, a champion of the Human Genome Project, and the creator of Mendelian Inheritance in Man.” With happy tears in his eyes, McKusick receives the Lasker Award and thanks to the audience and those who have accompanied him on his mission (McKusick).
If McKusick didn’t spend ten sweaty weeks in Massachusetts’s General Hospital, he may never have been introduced to the field of medicine. If World War II hadn’t challenged America with a physician shortage, McKusick wouldn’t have gotten out of medical school in time to treat Harold Parker and would have never discovered the linkage of the polyps-and-spot syndrome. If McKusick didn’t put all he had into the mapping the human genome, it may never have been done. Most importantly, if McKusick had listened to his peers when they called the field of genetics “professional suicide,” none of this would have been possible. Victor McKusick’s success in the field of genetics and DNA stems from Malcolm Gladwell’s theories about desirable difficulties, demographic luck, and grit.
Gladwell describes outliers as ordinary people who were simply given opportunities and chose to seize them. Joe Flom was successful because he took every opportunity he could for work, no matter how horrible it was, and when the shift of the economy came all that work paid off. The Termites were successful because they were born at just right the time to go to war single men and enter the workforce just after the Great Depression was over. KIPP Academy students were able to change the direction of their futures by hard work and sacrifice. Victor McKusick was able to become the most successful genetics because he jumped on each opportunity that came to him.
Works Cited
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success.Back Bay Books, 2013.
Lawrence, Altman K. “Victor McKusick, 86, Dies; Medical Genetics Pioneer.” The New York Times,24 July. 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/health/24mckusick.html. Accessed 28 Oct. 2018.
Leonhardt, David. “Chance and Circumstance.” The New York Times, 28 Nov. 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/books/review/Leonhardt-t.html. Accessed 30 Oct. 2018.
McKusick, Victor A. A 60-Year Tale of Spots, Maps, and Genes. Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, 2006.
Moneyball. Directed by Bennett Miller, Columbia Pictures, 2011.
U.S. National Library of Medicine.“The Victor A. McKusick Papers.” U.S. National Library of Medicine. https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/retrieve/Narrative/JQ/p-nid/304. Accessed 30 Oct. 2018.
Tough, Paul. “What It Takes to Make a Student.” New York Times, 26 Nov. 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/magazine/26tough.html. Accessed 16 Oct. 2018.
About the author: GRACE PERRENOUD
Grace Perrenoud, a freshman biology major from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, hopes to become a dermatology Physicians Assistant in the Twin Cities in the future. Perrenoud likes golden hour, golden retrievers, and using her dad’s gold credit card.
What I’ve Learned:
Be yourself. Have some personality in your speeches and papers if you really want people to listen.
Name your dogs, your reader will be much more engaged.
Organize your day for success, each day is a gift. Set it up in a way to maximize that gift and use it to your full advantage.
Work hard, play harder. Both Scott Winter and Victor McKusick are successful people that put the hard work in but don’t let that get in the way of their sense of humor.
Wash your hair before photo day if that photo is going to be on a published article. You’ll thank yourself later.
Don’t be a stranger, you’ll need other people’s advice, support, and connections to get to where you want to be.
Drop readers in a moment, before they drop your paper from boredom.
Carpe Diem, seize the day. Gladwell gives us a dozen examples of how successful people are just like us. However, they took every opportunity they could to achieve their goals.
You’ll end up where you need to be. Victor McKusick wanted to be a minister and now he’s the world’s best-known geneticist. You’ll find your niche.
Later is never the best time to do anything. When sitting in the Getsch basement during chapel break, staring at a blank word doc trying to drop readers in a moment about a geneticist no one really cares about, you’re going to wish you had started that paper earlier. This also applies to achieve your goals: start working toward your dream now not later.
