Myrna Gopnik is a Professor Emerita of Linguistics at McGill University.[1] She is known for her discovery of the FOXP2 gene (popularly referred to as "the language gene") through research on the KE family, an English family with several members affected by specific language impairment.[2][3][4] Her son Adam is a well-known novelist and writer for the New Yorker and her daughter Alison is a developmental psychology professor at UC-Berkeley.
Dr. Gopnik is generally credited with an important early evaluation of the KE family, and with making this family known to the wider scientific community. This subsequently led to the identification of the FOXP2 gene, sometimes called "the language gene" by Dr. Anthony Monaco and colleagues at Oxford University. (see: A forkhead-domain gene is mutated in a severe speech and language disorder. Lai CS, Fisher SE, Hurst JA, Vargha-Khadem F, Monaco AP. Nature. 2001 vol. 413(6855):pp.519-23.)