International Balzan Foundation Luigi Luca Cavalli

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
The Developments of My Research after the Balzan Prize (1999-2009)
by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
Professor Emeritus at the School of Medicine, Stanford University
The Balzan Foundation has taken the kind initiative of republishing in English
and Italian writings I had prepared for the Foundation on the occasion of receiving
the Balzan Prize (1999). My scientific activity has since continued and I
thought it useful to prepare a short update.
In 1999 I was, (and had been since 1992, according to the rules then in force), a
professor emeritus in the Department of Genetics at Stanford University Medical
School, though I officially remained “active”, meaning that I kept the right
to maintain my laboratory so long as I had the necessary research funds. In the
USA the best known universities expect professors to finance their own research
with funds from external foundations, which are much more numerous
and active than in Italy.
In 1992 I began to spend half of my year in Italy to continue research I had never
fully abandoned, and also started some new projects. In the first of these I
began a collaboration with my son Francesco to write science textbooks for
Italian secondary schools, which continues. Three scientific projects were effectively
started after the year 2000, even though they had been conceived of
and partly begun long before. One of these, called the Human Genome Diversity
Panel (HGDP) is a collection of lymphocyte cell lines from more than a total
of 1000 individuals, belonging to 52 ethnic groups from the five continents,
for obtaining DNA to distribute to non- commercial research laboratories – to
avoid DNA patenting which would have ruined research. These laboratories
made an undertaking to make their results public in detail before publications
using them, in order to favor further research by laboratories of human population
genetics, which are now numerous, from all over the world. This research
needs a large number of data. The cell lines were collected with the help
of several researchers, mostly personal friends, and are housed in the Paris
CEPH (Centre d’Etudes des Polymorphismes Humains) founded by Jean
Dausset, under the direction of Professor Howard Cann. The distribution of
DNAs to laboratories interested in analyzing them was begun in 2002, and to-
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