From Pea Plants to Patients: How Genetics Entered Medicine

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The path from the inheritance laws described by Mendel to clinical practice took most of the twentieth century. Genetic counseling and diagnosis of heritable disease grew steadily through mid-century, but board certification did not exist until the American Board of Medical Genetics and Genomics incorporated in 1980, with the physician David Rimoin serving as its first president. The board, developed in collaboration with the National Board of Medical Examiners, offered its first certifying examination in 1981, testing expertise across clinical genetics, laboratory genetics and genetic counseling. Full recognition followed in September 1991, when the American Board of Medical Specialties approved the board application, with the American Medical Association Council on Medical Education granting parallel approval that December. That certification track is recorded on this atlas as Medical Genetics, the diagnostic specialty; this article covers genetics as the wider discipline whose history runs from Mendel through the rediscovery of 1900 to the certification milestones a century later, including the pharmacogenomic and genomic medicine practice that has grown around it since.