Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Luca Cavalli - Sforza ( born January 25, 1922 in Genoa ) is an Italian population geneticist who teaches as a professor at Stanford University in California since 1970. He became known through studies in which he showed that there are parallels between the genetic relatedness of different nations and the degree of kinship of the languages ​​they speak. This led Cavalli - Sforza to draw conclusions about early migrations in human history.

Life

Cavalli - Sforza was born on January 25, 1922 in Genoa. He began to study medicine at the University of Pavia in 1938 and his doctorate in 1944. Following a brief period as a physician, he conducted research in 1945 at the University of Cambridge in the field of genetics of bacteria. In 1950 he left Cambridge and was until 1957 Director of Research of Microbiology at the " Istituto Sieroterapico Milanese " in Milan. For three years he lectured at the Universities of Parma and Pavia. In 1960 he became Professor of Genetics at Pavia, from 1962 to 1970 he taught as a professor of genetics and statistics at the Universities of Parma and Pavia. In 1970, he moved to Stanford University, where he became Professor Emeritus in 1992.

Cavalli - Sforza is married to Alba Buzzati and has four children. With his son Francesco, he published several books, including teaching materials for Italian middle schools.

Research

Cavalli - Sforza was basically researching about the descent of man. As the genetic structure of Inheritance ( DNA) was known, it was one of the first scientists to ask whether the genes of today's populations also contain historical information about the course of inheritance. His studies of genetic drift in the region of Parma were reflected in the book consanguinity, Inbreeding and Genetic Drift in Italy. Cavalli - Sforza joined demographic studies, which were based on linguistic, cultural and archaeological data with genetic data, such as the distribution of the blood groups. Therefore, he made numerous expeditions to collect blood samples and genetic material (eg, the pygmies in Africa). He was able to establish evolutionary family trees that were based on genetic, cultural, linguistic, anthropological and archaeological data. In addition, he designed genetic maps, which showed the distribution and spread of genes across the continents.

Cavalli - Sforza opposed the division of people into races, since humans have only a short evolutionary development behind it and the genetic differences within a group are far greater than those between different ethnic groups: " The physical characteristics may seem different, but under the skin, people are all closely related. " He also noted that there are other centers of distribution depending on the gene surveyed, and therefore occur only transitions between neighboring groups.

He proposes instead a combined pedigree before, which lists 38 geographically distinct human populations according to their genetic relatedness and their belonging to 20 families of languages ​​(based on the classification of Merritt Ruhlen ).

Cavalli - Sforza was the founder of the Human Genome Diversity Project.

Awards

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