Dr. Cooke And The Great Society

In 1948, after two years in the military, 27-year-old Cooke returned to Yale University on a research fellowship and worked with Dr. Daniel Darrow, an authority on salt water and potassium deficiencies in children’s diseases. Here, Cooke is seen working with a machine that analyzed the deficiencies in blood samples.

 It was a personal tragedy that motivated Dr. Robert Cooke to become an expert in retarded children. Fifty years ago, when he was a pediatrician in his early 30s, Cooke’s first wife gave birth to two daughters, both of whom were severely retarded.

“The cause of the retardation hadn’t even gotten a name when they were born,” Cooke says today, sitting in the living room of his Vero Beach home. “It wasn’t until 1963 that a French geneticist named Jerome Lejeune wrote a paper on the syndrome and called it Cri du Chat – Cat’s Cry. He used the name because the sound emitted by its victims was similar to the mewing of a cat.”

Lejeune’s research showed that the retardation was caused by a “deletion” in chromosome #5. In the case of the Cookes, it turned out that the mother had been the so-called “translocation carrier.”

Read the entire article in the September 2005 issue