Peter Byers, MD
Geneticist (USA)
Peter Byers, MD
Peter H. Byers, MD is a Professor, Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology and Department of Medicine (Medical Genetics)
After and undergraduate in Anthropology (Reed College, Portland, OR), an intensive year of “science” at Portland State College, and 4 years of medical school at Case Western University, Cleveland, OH, I spent 2 year in residency training in Internal Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. The pivot point in my career was the following 3 years at the National Institute of Dental Research, NIH, in George Martin’s laboratory. This introduced me to collagens, previously the most boring proteins in the world, convinced me of their dynamic nature and as a resource for understanding the genetics of rare disorders and as a window to fundamental biology. Then a 3 year combined fellowship in biochemistry (Paul Bornstein) and Medical Genetics (Arno Motulsky) put collagen biology into a clinical context and led by Arno’s maxim to “think genetically” laid the foundation for the next 40+ years of working with families with heritable connective tissue disorders (EDS, OI, Marfan syndrome) and the identification of the underlying genetic bases of these conditions.