Jay Seegmiller was born into a Latter-day Saint family in the small town of St. George in southwestern Utah.
He left NIH to become a founding faculty member of the new Medical School of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and became the first head of the Arthritis Division of the Department of Medicine.
Seegmiller embarked on his third and last career in 1983 when he was appointed founding Director of the Stein Institute for Research on Aging (SIRA) at UCSD.
In 1964 medical student Michael Lesch and pediatric faculty member Bill Nyhan at Johns Hopkins Hospital reported finding an X-linked recessive disorder in two young brothers with progressive mental retardation and a bizarre tendency to self-mutilation.
They discovered that this rare genetic disease, Lesch–Nyhan syndrome, was due to a profound deficiency of an enzyme known as hypoxanthine guanine phosphoribosyltransferase, or HGPRT, for short.