Profile of Haig H. Kazazian Jr.

Beth Azar

PNAS December 22, 2020 117 (51) 32185-32188

Figure: Prof. Haig H. Kazazian Jr.

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.