top of page
Jun 6, 20222 min read

Biologist - Barry Paw

By Sambidha Gurung '23

A tropical fresh-water fish, the zebrafish, is used to study human diseases.

Yes, this little fish is used to understand the genetic causes behind diseases and we can accredit this to the late Burmese-American biologist Barry Paw (1962 - 2017).

Paw was a refugee from Burma who immigrated at the age of 7 with his family and only $30 per person. Living in California, Paw went through public schooling and landed in University of California at Berkeley for his undergraduate years. At UCLA he attained his MD and Ph.D., while studying Tays-Sach disease, a rare genetic condition.


Paw then went on to complete his residency at Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School in hematology, the study of blood and blood disorders, and oncology, a branch of medicine dedicated to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer. This is where he did his research on zebrafish and made a name for himself in the hematology community.


Barry Paw’s investigation into the use of zebrafish first began when he did a fellowship with Dr. Leonard Zon who is the Grousbeck Professor of Pediatric Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Paw continued to research as an Associate Professor of Medicine and Investigator at Harvard which led him to pioneer the use of zebrafish as a model to study red blood cell development, specifically, in anemia, a condition where people lack sufficient oxygen to circulate oxygen to tissues. His work also led to the identification of several novel genes and their function in red blood cells. Paw was recognized for his dedication to hematology and received multiple awards in lifetime such as the William Randolph Hearst Young Investigator Award, Basil O’Connor Scholar Award, and the Young Investigator President’s Award. But Paw’s devotion to his career also went beyond the lab; he was a mentor revered by his trainees and colleagues alike. His memory lives on.

 

References

Comments

bottom of page