2010 William Allan Award Introduction: Jürg Ott

View Large Image | View Hi-Res Image | Download PowerPoint SlideI first met Jurg Ott in the summer of 1974, on a beach in Hawaii. I was finishing up a sabbatical year with Newton Morton in what was known as “The Population Genetics Lab” at the University of Hawaii, and he came to visit for a few days. I do not remember ever talking to him at the lab, but I do remember the conversation we had when we first met on the beach. He told me he had a paper coming out in the September issue of our journal (it was entitled “Estimation of the Recombination Fraction in Human Pedigrees: Efficient Computation of the Likelihood for Human Linkage Studies”) with the running title “New Method of Linkage Analysis.” He was very apologetic about the word “new” in the running title, telling me that the then editor—who was his post-doctoral mentor—had insisted that he include the word “new.” He said that he was very well aware of the method being the same as I had published in 1971, humbly taking no credit for the extension he had developed for a pedigree with more than one pair of founders.The interesting part of this story is how he came to know of my paper, published in Human Heredity—which was then hardly a first-class journal but, under his editorship from 1991–2004 and associate editorship from 2004–2007, later became one. (Parenthetically, the paper that described what is now known as the Elston-Stewart algorithm is one of those rare papers that was never spoiled by changes required by reviewers because at that time the journal never sent papers out for review). In the fall of 1972, I was invited to give a paper at the meeting of the American Heart Association in Dallas. The evening before my talk, I went straight from the airport to a restaurant, as I had been invited to dinner there by the officers of that association. In particular, Joe Goldstein was at the dinner and asked me how one could perform linkage analysis when the trait of interest was quantitative (I suppose he was thinking of cholesterol levels; he later shared the Nobel prize for the discovery of the low-density lipoprotein receptor, being an Allan Awardee in 1985). I replied that the answer was in two lines of my 1971 Human Heredity paper. I learned only in 1978 from Joe Felsenstein that, on his return to Seattle, Joe Goldstein told him—Joe Felsenstein—what I had said, and the latter passed this information on to Jurg, a postdoctoral student from Switzerland who was now in Human Genetics after completing his MS in Biomathematics. Thus was born the linkage program LIPED, and the rest, as they say, is history.It is now nearly forty years since Jurg made his humble start in the field of human genetics. Still active in research, he is now, at 71, Professor Emeritus at Rockefeller University and Professor at the Beijing Institute of Genomics, the 46th member of our Society to receive the Allan Award. Our early backgrounds and areas of research are similar and yet different in interesting ways. Like mine, his early education was in classics—we both spent much of our time learning Latin and Greek. While my undergraduate work, in the Natural Sciences, had a strong Zoology component, his doctoral work was in Zoology. My deep interest in statistics arose while studying for a Diploma in Agriculture, his when he obtained an MS degree in Biomathematics at the University of Washington and later while working as a biostatistician for Ciba-Geigy. After spending my first six years in this country, I returned to Britain, I thought permanently, but two years later I was enticed back and have been here ever since. After spending his first nine years in this country, Jurg returned to Switzerland—he must surely have thought this was a permanent move, because it took seven years before he came back, first to the New York State Psychiatric Institute, then Columbia University, and finally Rockefeller University. I am also at my third institution in the U.S. since coming back to the U.S., but much as I love China, I don't think I'll be moving there permanently any time soon!With all these similarities in our two careers, it gives me the greatest personal pleasure to present this year's Allan Awardee, Jurg Ott—author of about 300 articles and two books in statistical genetics (his seminal book “Analysis of Human Genetic Linkage” went through three editions), an accomplished pianist (I hated taking piano lessons when I was a boy), and a new father at 69 years old (I couldn't compete there, either).