The Blue Bird Circle

The Circle's best-known gift to medicine was a small, early grant. In 1983 it gave seed money to Huda Zoghbi, a young pediatric neurologist at Baylor who had left medical school in Beirut during Lebanon's civil war, for her first Rett syndrome work, on a disorder in which girls develop normally and then lose speech, social skills and motor control. In October 1999 her team at Baylor, working with Stanford, reported in Nature Genetics that mutations in the X-linked gene MECP2 cause it. The Circle's support of the Rett work had run nearly forty years by 2022.

What the plaque says

The Blue Bird Circle The Blue Bird Circle is a non-denominational philanthropic women's organization dedicated to serving the needs of children. Since its organization in January 1923 under the auspices of First Methodist Church, volunteers have committed time and money to create a young women's co-operative home, a day nursery and the "Little Hospital" for crippled children. In 1949 the Circle founded a clinic for children with cerebral disorders that grew into the renowned Blue Bird Circle Clinic for Pediatric Neurology. The Circle continues to support the clinic and fund pediatric research at the Developmental Neurogenetics Laboratory and the Rett Center at Baylor College of Medicine. (2001)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rothko Chapel — 0.5 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 0.6 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.
• The Menil Collection — 0.7 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 0.9 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.

More markers nearby

• The Waldo Mansion — 0.2 mi
• Louis Wiltz Kemp — 0.2 mi
• South Main Baptist Church — 0.3 mi
• Courtlandt Place — 0.5 mi