This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. (August 2013) |
Irene Ayako Uchida | |
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Born | Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada | April 8, 1917
Died | July 30, 2013 Toronto, Ontario, Canada | (aged 96)
Education | University of British Columbia University of Toronto |
Occupation | Geneticist |
Irene Ayako Uchida, OC (April 8, 1917 – July 30, 2013) was a Canadian scientist and Down syndrome researcher.[1]
Born in Vancouver, Uchida initially studied English literature at the University of British Columbia. As a child and teenager she played violin and piano, and was described as "outgoing" and "social." In 1940, she and two of her sisters visited her mother and youngest sister in Japan. She returned to Canada in November 1941, one month before Pearl Harbor.[2]
In Canada, she and her family were forcibly removed and incarcerated at a Canadian concentration camp in the Slocan Valley during World War II.[3]
In 1944 Uchida, 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.[4] 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.
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 1969, founding the cytogenetics laboratory. She became a professor in the pediatrics and pathology departments until leaving for Oshawa General Hospital to direct the cytogenetics laboratory in 1991.[5]
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".[6]