Marco Fraccaro

Marco Fraccaro (1926 to 2008) was an Italian physician and human geneticist, born and educated in Pavia, where his father was Rector of the University. After qualifying in medicine in 1951 he specialised in pathology at the Pavia Institute of Pathology, where Professor Giordano directed his attention to congenital malformation. A careful histological study of a cartilage disorder led him to call it achondrogenesis, and a form of it later carried his name. Turning to genetics, he spent a year at Lionel Penrose's Galton Laboratory in London from 1954, worked with Jan Bock in Uppsala from 1956 on some of the first human chromosome abnormalities, and spent 1961 to 1962 in Oxford at Alan Stevenson's Medical Research Council unit. He then returned to Pavia to establish a human genetics department focused on human cytogenetics.