Dr. Frederick Hecht, MD, lives in Scottsdale, Arizona. Dr. Hecht is a Pediatrician and Medical Geneticist and is certified by both the American Boards of Pediatrics and Medical Genetics. Dr. Hecht was born and raised in Baltimore and attended Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. and the Sorbonne at the University of Paris receiving his BA degree cum laude with distinction from Dartmouth. He then studied at Middlebury College in Vermont (in French), the Army Language School (in Russian) in Monterey, California, the University of Maryland (in German) and Boston University (in biomedical sciences) before entering the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. He received his MD degree from Rochester with honors.
Dr. Hecht trained first in Pediatrics at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, NY and at University Hospital in Seattle and then in Medical Genetics at the University of Washington. He has been on the medical school faculty at the Universities of Rochester, Washington, Oregon, Harvard, Arizona, Nevada and Nice (France). Dr. Hecht founded and served as President and Director of the Southwest Biomedical Research Institute in Arizona and Director of the Genetics Center and Cancer Center, now part of Genzyme, Inc. He has held administrative and research positions including that of Principal Investigator for grants and contracts from the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Hecht has taught at a number of institutions including Harvard Medical School and, most recently, served as Professor on the Faculty of Medicine, University of Nice, France where he worked in the Laboratory for the Molecular Genetics of Human Cancers, a unit of the CNRS (the French National Center for Scientific Research).
Dr. Hecht has published extensively, served on multiple medical journal editorial boards and reviewed articles for distinguished biomedical journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature, Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, Pediatrics and the Journal of Pediatrics. He is Co-Editor-In-Chief of the Webster's New World™ Medical Dictionary, Year 2000 First Edition and Year 2003 Second Edition. Outside of medicine, Hecht is a poet, writer and editor. His biography is in Who's Who in America and similar publications.