Gerald W. Dorn II: Thinker, Teacher, Tinkerer.

Abstract

Cardiologist and molecular and cell biologist Gerald Dorn, MD, has built his research career crafting interesting questions and teaching himself techniques needed to find answers. Using approaches including genetic and physiological manipulation in animal models, development of mini-mouse technology to elucidate cardiac mysteries, and human genetics/genomics, Dorn is helping to unravel cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying cardiomyopathy and heart failure.1,2 Gerald W. Dorn II Dorn, 57, is founding director of the Center for Pharmacogenomics at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, where he joined the faculty in 2008. As a teenager Dorn sped through high school, starting college two years early. He earned his medical degree and trained in internal medicine, pharmacology, and clinical and interventional cardiology at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in Charleston, where two key mentors sparked in him a passion for patient care and research. After a couple of years at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, Dorn moved to the University of Cincinnati, where an American Heart Association Established Investigator Award kick-started his research program. From 1990 to 2008 Dorn rose through the ranks at Cincinnati, capitalizing on the institution’s strength in mouse cardiac transgenesis. Dorn’s current interests include molecular mechanisms of cell death,3 microRNA regulation of cardiac genes,4 and mitochondrial dynamism5—work that has expanded to Parkinson’s disease. Building on an upbringing that valued lifelong growth, and drawing from his own broad experience, Dorn now leverages the holism of systems biology to fill in what he calls his field’s “infinitely large shades of gray.” My father was a career naval aviator. Whenever he moved, we moved. So I’m not really from anywhere. We spent a lot of time on both coasts. As a child I lived, in addition to …