Stuart Orkin

Stuart Holland Orkin is an American physician-scientist born April 23, 1946, in Manhattan, New York, who holds the David G. Nathan distinguished professorship at Harvard Medical School and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Boston Children's Hospital. During the 1970s and 1980s he identified the genetic mutations underlying the thalassemia blood disorders, in 1986 helped pioneer positional cloning through his discovery of the gene responsible for chronic granulomatous disease, cloned GATA1, the first transcription factor shown to control blood cell development, and beginning in 2008 demonstrated that the protein BCL11A represses fetal hemoglobin production, research underlying Casgevy, the first CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing therapy approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1991, and received the Gruber Prize in Genetics in 2021 and the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine in 2024.