"Remembering F. Clarke Fraser"

8am, June 29th, 2015.  Hotel Bonaventure, Montreal.

With the five speakers (left to right) - Patrick McLeod (Victoria), Diana Juriloff (UBC), Rick Finnell (Austin, TX), Jacquetta Trasler (McGill), and Michel Vekemans (Paris) - we had a really good hour-long tribute to our graduate supervisor at McGill, F. Clarke Fraser.

Here are the five, after their talks.  Diana and Michel were two of Clarke's last PhD students.  At age 94, Clarke was still sharp, still interested in what we were doing on the genetics of cleft lip and neural tube defects, and still able to come up with the key questions.

Diana, while reminding us all that it was only 5am Vancouver time and that she is NOT a morning person, gave a splendid talk.  "Oral Clefts" (cleft palate, cleft lip, and the multifactorial model) - Clarke's work and its impact, and our own work, including her current analysis of the role of methylation in the maternal effect on cleft lip risk.  I was so glad to be there.

Daphne Trasler (third from left), who did the early developmental work on cleft lip in the mouse and was a career-long close McGill colleague and friend of Clarke's, joined us for a 2-hour tea-visit ...

... from the left: Jacquetta Trasler (Daphne's genetics-prof daughter), Daphne, Rick, me, Susanna Finnell, Carolyn Kapron, Diana