Jacobs, Patricia Ann

Offprints of articles by Patricia Jacobs, 1957-2010; slides used to illustrate lectures, undated; and 3 large photographs of cells seen with 46 chromosomes, 1955.

1950s-2010

3 transfer boxes

The archives were transferred to the library at Wellcome Collection by the Wellcome Genetics Archives Project in December 2011.

Patricia Ann Jacobs (b.1934) is a British cytogeneticist. She is currently (2012) Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Southampton at Salisbury District Hospital.

In 1958 she joined the newly formed Medical Research Council Clinical Effects of Radiation unit under Michael Court Brown. In 1959 she was the first scientist to discover an abnormal chromosome in a human, specifically the 47,XXY constitution in males with Klinefelter Syndrome. This demonstrated the first evidence that the Y chromosome was ‘male determined’ in mammals. In 1970 she moved to America and joined the University of Hawaii in 1972, working on the cytogenetics of spontaneous abortion. In 1988 she returned to Britain as head of the Wessex Genetics Laboratory Service, Salisbury.

In 1993, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1999 she was awarded an OBE. Patricia Jacobs was elected as a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in February 2010, and in 2011 she received the March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology.

The archive was received by the Wellcome Genetics Archives Project from Professor Jacobs, mid 2011.

This collection is currently uncatalogued and cannot be ordered online. Requests to view uncatalogued material are considered on a case by case basis. Please contact collections@wellcomecollection.org for more details.