Reed G

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At 43, Dr Beatriz Marcheco is a busy woman: she directs the National Medical Genetics Center in Havana, a PAHO/WHO Collaborating Center for Developing Genetic Approaches for Health Promotion; chairs the National Expert Group in Clinical Genetics and the editorial board of the Revista Cubana de Genética Comunitaria; and is full professor at the Medical University of Havana.
Yet, her passion for human genetics was ignited by personal experience: towards the end of medical school, she realized her mother was suffering from Usher Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder leading to progressive hearing and vision loss. She came to know firsthand the devastation brought upon families by untreatable genetic diseases. "So it became a challenge for me," she says, "to prevent, to cure, or at least to help these people make their way through life with as little trauma as possible."