He's Canadian, he plays hockey and he has had a brush with Olympic glory. That's Gregory D. Longmore, MD, professor of medicine in the Division of Hematology.
No, he didn't play on an Olympic hockey team. Longmore's ice time is more recreational than professional, but he once conducted scientific research that cast new light on the athletic prowess of an Olympic gold medalist.
In the early 1990s as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Longmore found a genetic mutation in a red blood cell hormone receptor that caused mice to produce extra red blood cells. Then, while in Finland to give a scientific presentation, he met a clinician who happened to be studying an extended family with many members having high red blood cell counts.
One of them was Eero Mäntyranta, a famous Finnish athlete who won a dozen or so Olympic and world championship medals in cross-country skiing in the 1960s. Longmore's genetic discovery intrigued the clinician and a geneticist at the University of Helsinki, Finland, who decided they should look at the same gene in the skier and his kin...
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