November 20, 2011

Daniel Kastner

Dr. Daniel Kastner recalls "the wonderful opportunities" that the NIH afforded a young scientist and shares some behind-the-scenes stories of his research discoveries. About finding the gene for Familial Mediterranean Fever, Kastner says, "This was back at that wonderful time, the dawn of the Human Genome Project, when with positional cloning—that method in which if you could recruit a group of families, if you knew it was a single gene disease—you could discover the gene, even if you didn't know anything about it. Seeing the dramatic inflammatory phenotype...I thought: That's for me!...The adventure was on."

This page last reviewed on April 22, 2015