Luca Cavalli-Sforza

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
Cavalli-Sforza, October 2010.
Born	(1922-01-25) 25 January 1922 (age 95) Genoa, Italy
Occupation	Geneticist
Awards	Weldon Memorial Prize (1978)

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (Italian: [luˈiːdʒi ˈluːka kaˈvalli ˈsfɔrtsa]; born 25 January 1922) is an Italian-born population geneticist, who has been a professor (now emeritus) at Stanford University since 1970.

Cavalli-Sforza has summed up his work for laymen in five topics covered in Genes, Peoples, and Languages. According to an article published in The Economist, the work of Cavalli-Sforza "challenges the assumption that there are significant genetic differences between human races, and indeed, the idea that 'race' has any useful biological meaning at all". The book illustrates both the problems of constructing a general "hereditary tree" for the entire human race, and some mechanisms and data analysis methods to greatly reduce these problems, thus constructing a fascinating hypothesis of the recent 150,000 years of human expansion, migration, and human diversity formation. In the book Cavalli-Sforza asserts that Europeans are, in their ancestry, about two-thirds Asian and one-third African.

Cavalli-Sforza's The History and Geography of Human Genes (1994 with Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza) is a standard reference on human genetic variation. Cavalli-Sforza also wrote The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution (together with his son Francesco).

Earlier, in the 1970s, he and Walter Bodmer wrote what was the standard textbook on modern human genetics, and was also a basic reference for population genetics more generally, as the field was at the time, The Genetics of Human Populations. WHFreeman, 1971. The two, with Bodmer as first author, later wrote another more basic text, Genetics, Evolution, and Man WHFreeman, 1976. Along with his 1994 book these are essentially classical presentations of human genetics before the genomics era began providing very much more detailed data.

Cavalli-Sforza entered Ghislieri College in Pavia in 1939 and he received his M.D. from the University of Pavia in 1944. In 1949, he was appointed to a research post at the Department of Genetics, Cambridge University by the statistician and evolutionary biologist Ronald A. Fisher in the field of E. coli genetics. In 1950, he left the University of Cambridge to teach in northern Italy, Milan, Parma, and Pavia, and before finally taking up a professorship at Stanford in 1970, where he remains as an Emeritus Professor.