Peter Beighton

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Peter Beighton, a medical geneticist, was born in England in 1934 and qualified in medicine in 1957 at the University of London's St Mary's Hospital. After several internships, Beighton served as a Medical Officer in the Parachute Regiment and with the United Nations forces during the Congo crisis. In 1962 Beighton began training in internal medicine at St Thomas' Hospital in London. In Beighton had a research fellowship in clinical genetics in 1968-69 with Dr. Victor McKusick at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

In 1968 Beighton published a report in the British Heart Journal outlining that air travel can produce "an ideal climate for precipitating deep vein thrombosis". The airlines refused to warn passengers and it was only in the early 1990s that the link between long flights and deep vein thrombosis was made public.

Beighton did clinical research in the Sahara Desert and epidemiologic studies on Easter Island and in Southern Africa. In 1972, Beighton was appointed Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Cape Town's Faculty of Medicine. His research was largely on inherited disorders of the skeleton and connective tissues.

Beighton has received many awards including the gold medal of the British Orthopaedic Association, the President's Medallion of the South African Orthopaedic Association, the Smith & Nephew literary award and the silver medal of the South African Medical Research Council. In 2002, he received the Order of Mapungubwe - Bronze, for outstanding achievements in medical genetics.

Peter Beighton and his wife Greta Beighton have a shared interest in the history of medicine and have published two unique volumes of miniature biographies of people for whom syndromes have been named.

[edit] References

The Man Behind the Syndrome. By Peter Beighton & Greta Beighton. Springer Verlag (1986) ISBN 0387162186
The Person Behind the Syndrome. By Peter Beighton & Greta Beighton. Springer-Verlag; Revised edition (June 1997) ISBN 354076044X