An innovative biomedical pioneer
At a young age, Dr. Clarke Fraser harboured a desire to become a physician but when he attended Acadia University to study biology, he was captivated by genetics. Not wanting to abandon his earlier dream, Dr. Fraser became a fearless groundbreaker to merge his two intellectual passions. Before Dr. Fraser took the stage, genetics and medicine were two very separate fields. There was no vision for the potential of genetics in human medicine. At only 30 years of age, he became the founder of the Department of Medical Genetics at the Montreal Children’s Hospital – the first of its kind in a Canadian paediatric hospital.