1936-
Geneticist/Genetic Surgeon

Weird Little Boy.

W. French Anderson admits that he was "a rather weird little boy." Born on 31 December 1936 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Anderson could read, write, and do arithmetic by the time he entered kindergarten, skills, he said, that "did not endear him to the other schoolchildren." When he was eight years old Anderson was working his way through college medical textbooks in order to satisfy the love of science and medicine that he had developed at age three—a passion he has carried with him for the rest of his life. While an undergraduate at Harvard University, from which he graduated at seventeen in 1958, Anderson discovered his life's work. Attending a lecture about sickle-cell anemia, an inherited and usually fatal disease characterized by crescent-shaped blood cells, Anderson exclaimed: "You could actually change the genes and correct sickle-cell anemia." "What a...