Nat. Genet. 43, 7 (2011); published online 28 December 2010; corrected after print 4 February 2011

In the version of this obituary initially published, the date of death reported was incorrect. The correct date is 18 February 2010. Also, a quote was incorrectly attributed to Kurt Hirschhorn rather than David Valle, who introduced Childs at the 1999 meeting of the American College of Medical Genetics and not the American Society of Human Genetics. These errors have been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.