Any of you who've done the Ancestry or 23-and-Me genetic analysis to find out where you come from have Luigi Cavalli-Sforza to thank. He died at the very end of August at the age of 96.
Millions of people in recent years have sent off samples of their saliva to DNA-testing companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com hoping to find out where their forebears came from and whether they have mystery relatives in some distant land, or even around the corner.
The trend itself can be traced to an Italian physician and geneticist, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who died on Aug. 31 at his home in Belluno, Italy, at 96. He laid the foundation for such testing, having honed his skills more than 60 years ago using blood types and 300 years of church records to study heredity in the villagers of his own country.
Dr. Cavalli-Sforza was a pioneer in using genetic information to help trace human evolution, history and patterns of migration. The founder of a field that he called genetic geography, he was renowned for synthesizing information from diverse disciplines — genetics, archaeology, linguistics, anthropology and statistics — to explain how human populations fanned out over the earth from their original home in Africa.
David Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, said in an interview that Dr. Cavalli-Sforza was the first scientist to predict that there would be “enough information in genes to determine where people came from in the world and who they’re most closely related to.”
“A fair number of reasonable people,” he added, “thought it wouldn’t be possible.”
Dr. Cavalli-Sforza was a professor at Stanford University from 1970 to 1992 and continued to do research for more than a decade after retiring.
Described by colleagues as endlessly curious and fearless about venturing into unexplored zones, he studied fruit flies, bacteria, Italian marriage records, human blood groups, African Pygmies and the political and religious views of American college students and their parents, analyzing his own findings with merciless statistical rigor. Cultural traits and how they spread fascinated him, and late in life he began to study variations in hand gestures in different parts of Italy.
