Otto and Desiree Sanchez still remember the novelty of a Minnesota winter when their family moved from Venezuela to Minnesota in 1972 so that their father, also named Otto, could study at the University of Minnesota.
“They would flood the backyard at the University housing where we lived, and we had an ice rink and would play outside all the time,” says Otto Jr. (Ph.D. ’03), the oldest of the three Sanchez children. “When you’re kids, you don’t feel that cold.” And little did the siblings know that after moving home to Venezuela in 1975, the extended Sanchez clan would eventually find their way back to both Minnesota winters and the U of M.
Otto Sanchez Sr. (Ph.D. ’75) was already a practicing physician, medical lab technician, and medical school professor in Venezuela when he decided to move his family to Minnesota to earn a doctorate in clinical pathology.
He prepared for the experience by perfecting his English. “All of his magazines, and journals—everything on his night table was in English,” remembers Desiree (M.S. ’06). Then Otto Sr. attended his first class, only to discover that he didn’t understand a single word.
Soon after that initial jolt of culture shock, Otto Sr. overheard someone in a Mayo Building lab speaking Spanish. He introduced himself and discovered that that person was from Spain and was researching clinical genetics, a field then in its infancy. That the research was overseen by another native Spanish speaker—acclaimed geneticist Dr. Jorge Yunis—appealed to Otto Sr. He learned more about the specialty and soon after switched his doctoral thesis to clinical genetics.
That shift would turn out to have a profound impact on the field.
