Paul Quinton

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Paul M. Quinton (born 1944) is an American physiologist and professor. He teaches pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego, and Biomedical Sciences at the University of California, Riverside.

Quinton grew up in Southeast Texas. As a child he had a chronic cough and salty stains on his clothes from sweating. His mother would put Vicks VapoRub on his chest to help his cough.

In college at the University of Texas at Austin, after coughing up blood, he started looking into possible illnesses like bronchitis and bronchiectasis. He read about cystic fibrosis (CF) and the description matched his symptoms. A sweat test confirmed he had CF. After that, he dedicated his work to finding the underlying causes of the disease.

Quinton earned a PhD from Rice University. He studied sweat glands and how salt moves in and out of cells. Sweat glands are easier to study in CF patients because other organs are more damaged by the disease. He even removed his own sweat glands to study them. He found that in CF patients, the body’s salt reabsorption during sweating is faulty, which leads to very salty sweat and to thick mucus that can harm the lungs.

In the early 1980s, Jeffrey Wine, a Stanford psychologist, joined his lab after his daughter was diagnosed with CF. Wine later started his own CF lab at Stanford.

In 2015, Quinton and other CF doctors publicly criticized Vertex Pharmaceuticals for charging too much for its CF drug Orkambi. The price was about $259,000 per patient per year, which they called egregious. Vertex said high prices were needed to cover drug development and fund more research. Quinton also highlighted large bonuses given to Vertex executives and questioned the ethics of access to the drugs. They hoped for open discussions, but the concerns were largely ignored.

Quinton was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2000. He is married and, with his wife, adopted a son.