David Rimoin

David Lawrence Rimoin (1936 to 2012) was a Canadian American medical geneticist best known for his work on skeletal dysplasias such as dwarfism, on inherited disorders such as Tay-Sachs disease, and on the genetics of diabetes. Born in Montreal, he studied at McGill University, trained at the Royal Victoria Hospital and at Johns Hopkins under Victor McKusick, and took a doctorate in medical genetics. His doctoral work on diabetes argued that it was not one disorder but had several genetic causes, a view later upheld. He moved to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in 1970 and to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in 1986, founded the International Skeletal Dysplasia Registry, helped organise the California Tay-Sachs screening program, co-edited Principles and Practice of Medical Genetics and served as the first president of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics. He died in Los Angeles in 2012.