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Obituary: Luca Cavalli-Sforza
讣告：路卡·卡瓦利-斯福扎
The drift of humankind
人类的漂流
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, population geneticist, died on August 31st, aged 96
群体遗传学家路易吉·路卡·卡瓦利-斯福扎，逝于8月31日，享年96岁
FOR a man who spent his career illuminating the vast, dim migrations of people in prehistory, Luca Cavalli-Sforza's life was remarkably circular.
路卡·卡瓦利-斯福扎终其职业生涯都在阐释史前人类模糊的大迁徙，一生都在循环研究。
He first became interested in his major field, genetics, in the house of the geneticist Adriano Buzzati at Belluno, in the hills north of Venice.
卡瓦利-斯福扎第一次对自己的专业领域遗传学发生兴趣是在遗传学家阿德里亚诺·布扎蒂的家里，位于威尼斯北侧的山区贝卢诺市。
There he helped to collect thousands of flies in search of mutant Y chromosomes;
那里，卡瓦利-斯福扎曾帮助收集数千只蝇，用于寻找突变的Y染色体；
and though he subsequently travelled the world to study the makeup of its tribes and populations, it was in Belluno that he died.
在后虽周游世界去研究世界各地人类部落和群体的组成，但终离世于贝卢诺。
He had vaguely meant to be a doctor, but found his training useless in wartime hospitals.
卡瓦利-斯福扎曾草草打算成为一名医生，但是发现自己在战时医院的训练并派不上什么用场。
Instead, he took up the genetic study of E. coli bacteria, shutting himself away in the laboratory.
相反，他把自己关在实验室，开始进行大肠杆菌的遗传研究。
But human beings still fascinated him:
但人类学依然吸引着他：
not least because he increasingly realised that the human genome contained not only the instructions for building future members of the species, but also its entire past.
尤其因为他逐渐意识到人类基因不仅包含着对未来物种的指导，而且也是过去的体现。
Migration, conquest and isolation had also left their traces in living populations.
移民、征服和隔离也在如今的群体中留下了踪迹。
He set out to find them.
卡瓦利-斯福扎开始努力寻找这些踪迹。
The technology available was rudimentary.
可用的技术是初级的。
He pored over names in parish registers and learned to do statistics, convinced that with enough patience he could measure anything.
卡瓦利-斯福扎仔细研究教区记事录的名字，并学会了做统计，他坚信只要有足够的耐心，就能衡量一切。
For one early paper he pulled surnames from Italian phone directories as proxies for father-son transmission.
为完成一篇早期论文，他从意大利电话簿中提取出姓氏，作为父子传播的索引。
By plotting the distribution of names in 91 provinces, he showed that the Apennines—the backbone of Italy—had formed a natural barrier to migration for millennia,
通过标绘91个省人名的分布，他表明亚平宁山脉——意大利的脊梁——在几千年的时间里形成了一个自然的迁徙障碍，
resulting in genetically distinct populations on either side.
由此导致山两边人类群体的基因差别。
And because he could also measure variation in blood proteins, such as that between A, B and O blood types,
由于他也能测量血液蛋白质的变化，如A、B、O血型的血液蛋白质变化，
he also collected blood samples from townsfolk all over the Parma valley to show that marriage between related individuals had led to many of the genetic differences between those towns.
所以他还收集了帕尔马河谷各地居民的血样，以证明相关个体之间的婚姻导致了这些城镇之间的许多遗传差异。
译文由可可原创，仅供学习交流使用，未经许可请勿转载。
