Peter McGuffin

Peter McGuffin was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland on 4 February 1949,the eldest of 3 children of Martha Melba (née Burnison) and William Brown McGuffin, a merchant navy officer and Royal Naval reservist. The family moved to the Isle of Wight in 1959 on the appointment of William as a Trinity House Pilot for the Port of Southampton.

McGuffin entered Sandown Grammar School, Isle of Wight aged 10 and made an early career choice age 15 that he wanted to become a psychiatrist after coming across Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, in the local public library at Ryde. He attended medical school at the University of Leeds, England where he graduated in 1972 and then received postgraduate training in internal medicine. It was at this stage that he became interested in genetics and had his first publications on immunogenetic aspects of coronary heart disease. He transferred this interest to psychiatric disorders and while he and his wife Anne Farmer were still junior doctors in Leeds, carried out one of the first genetic marker association studies on schizophrenia.[1] This suggested an association between the HLA system and the disorder, something that was subsequently confirmed 36 years later by a genome wide association study led by one of McGuffin's former PhD students Michael C O’Donovan [2]

He completed his training as a psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital, London and was awarded a Medical Research Council Fellowship to study genetics at the University of London and at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri where he spent a formative 18 months under the mentorship of Theodore (Ted) Reich and Irving I Gottesman. He completed a PhD with a thesis describing one of the first multi marker genetic linkage studies in schizophrenia. He subsequently became an MRC Senior Clinical Fellow at the Maudsley and the Institute of Psychiatry (now part of King's College London) and then took up the Chair of Psychological Medicine at the University of Wales College of Medicine in Cardiff in 1987. He subsequently established the Cardiff department as one of the World's leading centres for psychiatric genetic research and was among the early pioneers of multi-centre international collaborations in psychiatric genetics such as the European Science Foundation programme on the Molecular Neurobiology of Mental Illness.[3] He moved back to London as successor to Prof Sir Michael Rutter as Director of the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry in October 1998. From January 2007 to December 2009, he was the Dean of the Institute of Psychiatry.[4] He was elected a founder Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1998. Despite his very early Freudian leanings, McGuffin's research, his books and papers have been mainly on the genetics of normal and abnormal behaviour.

He met Anne Farmer at medical school in Leeds and they married on graduation in 1972. She subsequently also became an academic psychiatrist and they published many papers together as well as having 3 children and 5 grandchildren.

McGuffin was elected Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1988 and Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 1989 and became a founder Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1998. Other honours include Lifetime Achievement Awards from the International Society for Psychiatric Genetics (2007) and King's College London (2012) and an Honorary Fellowship from Cardiff University (2008). He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2016 Birthday Honours for services to biomedical research and psychiatric genetics.[5] He served as the second president of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics (1996-2000) .

McGuffin has published more that 500 papers and is one of the 3000 or so researchers who, according to Google Scholar, has an H index of more than 100.[6]

• Behavioral Genetics in the Postgenomic Era, by Robert Plomin, John C. DeFries, Ian W. Craig, and Peter McGuffin
• Behavioral Genetics by John C. DeFries, Peter McGuffin, Gerald E. McClearn, and Robert Plomin
• Beyond Nature and Nurture in Psychiatry, by James MacCabe, Owen O'Daly, Robin Murray, and Peter McGuffin
• Psychiatric Genetics and Genomics, by Peter McGuffin, Michael J. Owen, and Irving I. Gottesman
• Measuring Psychopathology, by Anne Farmer, Peter McGuffin, and Julie Williams
• The New Genetics of Mental Illness, by Peter McGuffin and Robin Murray
• Schizophrenia: The Major Issues, by Paul Bebbington and Peter McGuffin
• The Essentials of Psychiatry, by Robin Murray, Ken Kendler, Peter McGuffin, and Simon Wessely