Like most first-time moms, Lois Victor was ecstatic after the birth of her daughter, Debbie. But within hours of the infant’s arrival, euphoria gave way to concern.

“She was very sickly from the day she was born,” the Palm Beach County resident recalls of Debbie, to whom Victor gave birth in 1960. Physicians of that era were at a loss to explain the baby’s laundry list of medical problems, including daily fainting spells, mottled skin, poor pulmonary function and a badly curved spine. Debbie was eventually diagnosed with familial dysautonomia, a Jewish genetic disease that ended her life at age 8 and that claimed Victor’s second daughter, Linda, at 35.

Burying a child is any parent’s greatest nightmare, and Victor has endured that horrific ordeal twice. It’s made her an implacable foe of all genetic disorders affecting Jews of Eastern European descent, not just familial dysautonomia. Victor recently designated the Miller School as an ally in her fight, with a gift that created the Victor Center for Ashkenazi Jewish Genetic Diseases.

“I would like to see Jewish genetic diseases wiped out in my lifetime,” says Victor, who’s also collaborating with Tufts Medical Center in Boston and Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia. “There is no reason in America for children to be born with Jewish genetic diseases.”

Along with familial dysautonomia, the Victor Center for Ashkenazi Jewish Genetic Diseases targets Tay-Sachs, Niemann-Pick disease Type A, mucolipidosis IV, Gaucher disease Type 1, Fanconi anemia Type C, cystic fibrosis, Canavan disease, and Bloom syndrome.

“These diseases are preventable,” says Victor, who drives that point home at least ten times in the course of an hour. “Why wouldn’t you be proactive enough to take control of your life while you still can?”

Prevention is achieved through screening prospective parents with a simple blood test. If both parents are carriers of a genetic mutation for the same disease, they have a 25 percent chance of having an affected child and a 50 percent chance of having a child who’s a carrier. It’s been estimated that one in five Jews of Eastern European descent is a carrier of one of the nine genetic conditions mentioned.

The main weapons of the Victor Center are education, counseling, and screening, says Deborah Barbouth, M.D., the center’s medical director.

Under the direction of Barbouth, an assistant professor of pediatrics in the Dr. John T. Macdonald Foundation Department of Human Genetics, the Victor Center has conducted screening of Miller School students as well as students on UM’s Coral Gables campus and at the University of Florida, in Gainesville.

There’s also a chance that the center, which has been operating since November 2007, may start screening for two additional Jewish genetic diseases this year, according to Barbouth.

That’s music to Lois Victor’s ears. “My mission is to have all Jews of childbearing age tested as a matter of course,” she says.