Irene Uchida

After suffering from dementia for over a decade, Irene died in a nursing home in Toronto on July 30, 2013, at the age of 96.

In 1993, she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada for "her research on radiation and human chromosome abnormalities [that] has made a notable contribution to medical science".

In 1970, Dr. Uchida founded the Cytogenetics Laboratory at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Her expertise in genetics led to her become the President of the American Society of Human Genetics in 1960, a member of the Science Council of Canada from 1970 to 1973, a member of the Advisory Committee on Genetic Services for Ontario in 1979, a consultant to the American Board of Medical Genetics in 1980, and a member of the Canadian College of Medical Geneticists from 1980 to 1984, among other things.

In 1960 she became the director of the Department of Medical Genetics at the Children's Hospital in Winnipeg and became a professor at the University of Manitoba (National Library of Canada and National Archives of Canada, 1997). She moved to McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1969, where she was a professor or pediatrics and pathology and directory of the cytogenetics lab until she retired in 1985.

In 1960, Dr. Uchida was appointed Director of the Department of Medical Genetics at the Children's Hospital in Winnipeg, Manitoba and began teaching at University of Manitoba. After scientists in France discovered that people with Down syndrome had 47 chromosomes instead of the normal 46, she decided to investigate the cause of the extra chromosome. Cytogenetics, the study of chromosomes in cells, focuses on the identification and behavior of chromosomes, and Dr. Uchida was the first scientist to bring this technique to Canada. During ward rounds in the nursery to discuss cytogenetics of Down syndrome as well as a birth-defect syndrome found to be caused by trisomy 18, Dr. Uchida investigated the possibility of a newborn with this birth defect. She persuaded her lab, then studying chromosomes of fruit flies, to study the chromosomes from the blood sample taken from the nursery, found trisomy, and started Canada's first clinical cytogenetics program.

The support and encouragement of one of her professors, Norma Ford Walker, head of the Department of Zoology but soon to become the director of a newly formed Department of Genetics at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, however, influenced Uchida to instead pursue the field of human genetics. In 1951 she completed her PhD in zoology.

While in this internment camp, Irene was asked to be the principal of a school for children of internees because of her university education. After her father chose to return to his wife in Japan as an exchange for Allied prisoners of war, Irene accepted the support of the United Church, which offered her a place to stay and encouraged her to finish her degree at University of Toronto. Uchida earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1946, intending to continue her education by getting a master's degree in social work.

In 1944 she continued her studies at the University of Toronto where she wanted to get a master's degree in social work. Her professors encouraged her to pursue a career in genetics, and as a result she completed PhD in human genetics at the University of Toronto in 1951 and worked at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. At the Hospital for Sick Children she studied twins and children with Down syndrome. In the 1960s she helped identify the link between pregnant women who had undergone abdominal X-rays and chromosomal birth defects such as Down syndrome in their subsequent pregnancies. She was also amongst those researchers in the 1960s who showed that the extra chromosome associated with Down Syndrome is not always from the mother, but the father may be responsible for 25 per cent of the births.

Born in Vancouver, she initially studied English literature at the University of British Columbia. As a child and teenager she played violin and piano, and was described as "out-going" and "social." She went to visit her mother and sister who were in Japan at the time, and was able to catch a ship out of Japan prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

Irene's parents owned two bookstores, so it is fitting that after high school she went on to study English literature at the University of British Columbia. Her education was interrupted, however, after she travelled with her mother and sisters to Japan in 1941. She returned on the last ship back to Canada before the attack on Pearl Harbor that year, her mother and sisters remaining in Japan. Because of the war and the fear it created that the Japanese minority in Canada were a security threat, Irene and her family members who were still in Canada were forced to leave their home and live in an internment camp at Christina Lake, British Columbia.

Irene Ayako Uchida, OC (April 8, 1917 – July 30, 2013) was a Canadian scientist and Down syndrome researcher.

Dr. Uchida published more than 95 scientific papers and received numerous awards for her research including Woman of the Century 1867-1967 for Manitoba and the Order of Canada in 1993.