2007 Marion Downs Lecture in Pediatric Audiology:
“How Can Newborn Hearing Screening be Improved?”
presented by Walter E. Nance, MD, Ph.D.
The American of Academy of Audiology Foundation is please to announce that Walter E. Nance, MD, Ph.D. of Virginia Commonwealth University has been selected as the speaker for the 2007 Marion Downs Lecture in Pediatric Audiology at AudiologyNOW! This year’s lecture is scheduled for April 20 from 10-11:30am in the Colorado Convention Center. The AAA Foundation annually funds the Marion Downs Lecture with a grant from The Oticon Foundation.
Dr. Nance was born in Manila in 1933, and spent his childhood first in Shanghai, then New Orleans, and finally, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He graduated from the Phillips Exeter Academy in 1950, and was later awarded an SB degree in Mathematics (Optime Merens), from the University of the South in 1954. From Sewanee, he went to Harvard Medical School, where he obtained his MD degree in 1958, and received the Boyleston Society Award for a paper on human twinning, that was later published in Medicine.
Dr. Nance completed an internship and residency in Internal Medicine at Vanderbilt University, where he earned the reputation of being more interested in the family history than the present illness of his patients, causing his Chairman, Dr. David Rogers to urge him to obtain training in Genetics “before you hurt somebody”. He attended the first of the more than 40 annual Bar Harbor courses in Human Genetics, organized by Dr. Victor McKusick, and the realization that his interest in genetics was shared by other physicians, lead him to apply for an NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship in Human Genetics at the University of Wisconsin, where he eventually obtained his Ph.D. degree under the direction of Dr. Oliver Smithies.
Dr. Nance returned to Vanderbilt as a Markle Scholar in Academic Medicine in 1965, and was then recruited to Indiana University at Indianapolis in 1970, where he was a professor of Human Genetics became the Principle Investigator of the Indiana University Human Genetics Center. In 1975, he left Indiana Unviersity to establish one of the first Departments of Human Genetics in the southeast at Virginia Commonwealth University. In 2001, he stepped down as Chair of the Department to pursue his research full time.
Dr. Nance has two children, a geneticist and a science writer, and two grandsons, and is married to a young woman named Mayna who was a classmate when they were in the second grade at the Shanghai American School.
Dr. Nance has served as President of the American Society of Human Genetics, the American Board of Human Genetics, and the International Society for Twin Studies, and has served as Chairman of the Genetics Study Section and as an Advisor to the National Institute of Deafness and Communicative Diseases. He is the author of more than 300 books and articles, and has served on the committees of more than 40 graduate and postdoctoral students. He has had a career-long interest in the genetics of deafness that began with the description of several new forms of syndromic deafness when he was at Vanderbilt and Indiana. His current interests include newborn screening for deafness, the mapping and identification of genes for non-syndromic deafness, as well as an analysis of the possible causes for the high frequency of connexin deafness and their relevance to human evolution.
Dr. Nance’s presentation, “How Can Newborn Hearing Screening Be Improved?” will review recent advances in our understanding of genetic deafness, the factors that have influenced the frequency and causes of deafness throughout the world, as well as the cultural and ethical issues involved in efforts to treat and prevent deafness. In addition Dr. Nance will emphasize the expanded role that audiologists are well equipped to play in the management of patients and their families.
Dr. Nance will also suggest improvements to newborn screening programs. The first area includes the immediate confirmation of abnormal screening test results. Secondly, improvements should include the adoption of an etiologic focus. This goal implies not simply an intimate familiarity with the environmental and genetic forms of deafness, but an understanding of the mechanisms that contribute to the extraordinary worldwide variation in the frequency of specific genes and environmental causes, and the social and ethical impact on efforts to treat and even prevent deafness. Finally, screening should include universal molecular testing for four important causes of deafness: newborn screening for just four genetic and environmental causes in the U.S. would identify the most important genetic and environmental forms of congenital and delayed prelinguistic deafness, and the most important cause of preventable deafness. Such tests would be a powerful adjunct to existing audiologic programs.