Yury Verlinsky

Verlinsky died in Chicago of colon cancer on July 16, 2009, at the age of 65. He is survived by his wife, Luba, a son, Oleg, his brother, Vitaly, and three grandchildren.

In 2000, his technique became notable when it helped the parents of Molly Nash, a child who suffered from life-threatening Fanconi anemia, conceive a son without the disease and whose cells were later used to save Molly's life. In 2002, his method also helped a mother, whose genetic diagnosis showed a likelihood of getting Alzheimer's disease, conceive a daughter who was free of the gene. The case was declared a "medical milestone" as the first use of genetic testing to prevent an early onset form of Alzheimer's disease.

In 1990, he established the private Reproductive Genetics Institute in Chicago to provide prenatal testing. According to his colleague, Dr. Norman Ginsberg, he was "a hard-working scientist, . . . . the first in the lab in the morning and the last out at night." Profits from his work were plowed back into research. "Rather than just make himself rich, he used this money to do a whole range of testing," Ginsberg added.

One such friend and colleague that he lost contact with was Anver Kuliev, with whom he had done research when he was still in Moscow. They had worked together developing a prenatal test that could be administered earlier than amniocentesis, with the goal of allowing a woman to avoid a second-trimester abortion. Years later, after Verlinsky had settled in the U.S., he was in London for a scientific meeting and discovered that Kuliev was working in the Soviet Union as head of genetics for the World Health Organization (WHO). Verlinsky contacted him, they met in Geneva in 1982, and soon after they began working together, again doing embryonic and genetic research. Kuriev would later become director of the Reproductive Genetics Institute that Verlinsky established in 1990.

After graduating with his Ph.D., he submitted research proposals which were all rejected by government committees. He chose to emigrate to the United States when the Soviet government continued to refuse his requests to fund further research into PGD, a field in which he was an early practitioner. This became difficult as he was forced to pay back the cost of his education before receiving his exit visa ("diploma tax"), which required that he borrow money from friends. He eventually left for the United States with his wife, their nine-year-old son, and just "two suitcases." He arrived in 1979, one of the many thousands of other Soviet Jews that were allowed to leave that same year, including a young Sergey Brin, who later co-founded Google, Inc.

Verlinsky was born in Ishim, Tyumen Oblast, Siberia, in the former Soviet Union, one of two sons of Simon Verlinsky and Dora Verlinskaya. His mother was an accountant and his father was a disabled veteran of the Soviet Army. Yury received his Ph.D. in embryology and cytogenetics from Kharkiv University, in the Ukrainian SSR, in 1973. While there, he met his wife Luba, a biologist. They married in 1967.

Yury Verlinsky (1 September 1943 – 16 July 2009) was a Russian-American medical researcher specializing in embryonic and cellular genetics (genetic cytology). He is best known as a pioneer in prenatal diagnosis for detecting genetic and chromosomal disorders six weeks earlier than standard amniocentesis. The founding father of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and embryo analysis prior to in-vitro fertilization (IVF), Verlinsky used his polar body biopsy technique to detect potential birth defects in offspring. It is now accepted worldwide as the standard for the most efficient and effective means of analyzing the chromosomal status of an embryo.

Verlinsky developed his ideas for genetic screening before doing in-vitro fertilization, he says, "while viewing a 1935 Joan Miró painting in a Jerusalem art gallery." He observed that the painting showed "two disks, one red and one yellow, floating in space, with a small, round black object under the red one." The disks reminded him of human eggs, with one changing into the other by ejecting the black object. "In a flash of insight," he took out a business card and wrote "polar bodies" on the back of it.