Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza intervied by Federica Crivellaro, 5th December 2006

0:05:07 Born in Genoa, Italy, in 1922; family moved to Turin and all my schooling was there; at that time the curriculum was strictly classical; had to learn mathematics later at university doing medicine; Latin learnt in depth and gave excercise in both deduction and induction so a more complete training than in the kind of biology study still done in universities which is basically the teaching of names; took exam for university early; spent first year at Turin, but grandparents found I could go to a good college in Pavia (college system like Oxford and Cambridge); enjoyable part of my life; graduated in medicine but wanted to do more quantitive work that is done in classical biology; met a very good geneticist at Pavia who had gone to the United States; wanted to do population genetics; in 1942 taken to Germany by professor to the Kaiser Willhelm Institute in Berlin; decided to do bacterial genetics which did not exist at that time; took degree in 1944 and managed to get a job at a pharmaseutical institute to do research; 1948 managed to get a scholarship to England to work with Sir Kenneth Mather; same year went to international conference in genetics in Stockholm and met R.A. Fisher who offered me a job; arrived in Cambridge end of 1948 and developed a small bacteriological laboratory

7:38:12 Arrived in Cambridge end of 1948 and developed a small bacteriological laboratory; problems faced when working with strains of bacteria; findings; went back to Italy and taught genetics at University of Parma; inspired by a student who was also a priest to investigate church records on marriage; theories of drift in genetics; decided to do comparison of demography in real populations and genetics; at the time not many genes that one could study; familiar from time in pharmacutical company with work on blood groups so could combine with demography, which would show how much drift to expect; focussed on the valley of Parma which has largish towns in the plains with smaller villages as one goes into the mountains; had 400 years of demography and collected samples of blood with the help of the student priest; collected blood samples from 75 villages; found on investigation that there were genetic differences in the mountain which were undetectable in the plains; in order to predict exactly the amount of drift did a population simulation; have recently been working again on this material and found exactly the same amount of drift which one would expect on the basis of demography

20:00:00 First research took 5-6 years to finish initially; recently found that the use of surnames is also a good, cheap marker; done research in Italy using surnames from the 'phone book; next research conducted with Anthony Edwards, a PhD student of Fisher's at Cambridge; he spent three years with me at Pavia where I was now working; we had the first computer that was bought by an Italian university; sent Edwards to see Morant in London, an expert on blood groups, to suggest populations to work on, ideally three per continent, far enough apart not to be effected by migration; developed methods to reconstruct evolutionary trees; tree we produced showed that populations from the same continent went together; tried again with anthropometric characteristics and found the tree was different; in tree with genes Africans were on one side, Australian Aborigines and American Indians on the other, but in the anthropometric tree Africans, Aborigines and New Guineans went together; reference to first paper published jointly

27:08:00 Had put together demography and genetics which worked very well and now wanted to add archaeology; found a collaborator in Albert Ammerman who graduated from the Institute of Archaeology in London and was working in Italy; together went to Stanford and worked together for 5-6 years on the early impact of agriculture on demography; earliest agriculture in the Middle East, shortly followed by North and South China, then probably the Sahara, then Mexico; looked at how fast it spread using radio-carbon dating of wheat; collaborated with Alberto Piazza and Paolo Menozzi (now an ecologist) on the genetics of Europeans; found that the spread mimiced the information from the spread of wheat from the Middle East; debates over the results 

36:55:01 Linguistic work; after doing the work on agriculture in Europe decided to extend the analysis to whole world with Menozzi and Piazza published as 'History and Geography of Human Genes' published 1994; linguistic work arose during work on this book because of the link between populations and language; found a stong link between archaeology, language and genetics, hinted at by Darwin; development of a tree of languages to which I added dates; work on Y chromosones

45:03:13 Starting my career today I would go into neuro-physiology; genome has become a big engineering effort; human genome diversity project; Cambridge experience ended after two years when I returned to Italy; thoughts about Cambridge