Peter Beighton

Who is Peter Beighton?

Peter H Beighton, a medical geneticist, was born in Lancashire in England in 1934 and qualified in medicine in 1957 at St Mary's Hospital, University of London. After several internships, Beighton served as a Medical Officer in the Parachute Regiment and with the United Nations forces during the Congo Crisis. In 1966 Beighton began training in internal medicine at St Thomas' Hospital in London and held a Fulbright research fellowship in clinical genetics in 1968-69 with Dr. Victor McKusick at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, USA.

In 1968 Beighton published a report in the British Heart Journal outlining that air travel can produce "an ideal climate for precipitating deep vein thrombosis". The airlines did not warn passengers and it was only in the early 1990s that the link between long flights and deep vein thrombosis was made public.

Beighton undertook clinical research in the Sahara Desert and epidemiologic studies on Easter Island, Tristan da Cunha and in Southern Africa. In 1972, Beighton was appointed Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Cape Town's Faculty of Medicine. His research was largely on inherited disorders of the skeleton and connective tissues.

Beighton has received several awards including the gold medal of the British Orthopaedic Association, the President's Medallion of the South African Orthopaedic Association, the Smith & Nephew literary award and the silver medal of the South African Medical Research Council. In 2002, he was the first recipient of the newly established Order of Mapungubwe - bronze, which was bestowed for lifetime achievement as a scientist, and for research into the inherited disorders of the skeleton.