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Obituary: Luca Cavalli-Sforza
訃告：路卡·卡瓦利-斯福扎
The drift of humankind
人類的漂流
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, population geneticist, died on August 31st, aged 96
群體遺傳學家路易吉·路卡·卡瓦利-斯福扎，逝于8月31日，享年96歲
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-斯福扎終其職業生涯都在闡釋史前人類模糊的大遷徙，一生都在循環研究。
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-斯福扎第一次對自己的專業領域遺傳學發生興趣是在遺傳學家阿德里亞諾·布扎蒂的家里，位于威尼斯北側的山區貝盧諾市。
There he helped to collect thousands of flies in search of mutant Y chromosomes;
那里，卡瓦利-斯福扎曾幫助收集數千只蠅，用于尋找突變的Y染色體；
and though he subsequently travelled the world to study the makeup of its tribes and populations, it was in Belluno that he died.
在后雖周游世界去研究世界各地人類部落和群體的組成，但終離世于貝盧諾。
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為一名醫生，但是發現自己在戰時醫院的訓練并派不上什么用場。
Instead, he took up the genetic study of E. coli bacteria, shutting himself away in the laboratory.
相反，他把自己關在實驗室，開始進行大腸桿菌的遺傳研究。
But human beings still fascinated him:
但人類學依然吸引著他：
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.
尤其因為他逐漸意識到人類基因不僅包含著對未來物種的指導，而且也是過去的體現。
Migration, conquest and isolation had also left their traces in living populations.
移民、征服和隔離也在如今的群體中留下了蹤跡。
He set out to find them.
卡瓦利-斯福扎開始努力尋找這些蹤跡。
The technology available was rudimentary.
可用的技術是初級的。
He pored over names in parish registers and learned to do statistics, convinced that with enough patience he could measure anything.
卡瓦利-斯福扎仔細研究教區記事錄的名字，并學會了做統計，他堅信只要有足夠的耐心，就能衡量一切。
For one early paper he pulled surnames from Italian phone directories as proxies for father-son transmission.
為完成一篇早期論文，他從意大利電話簿中提取出姓氏，作為父子傳播的索引。
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,
通過標繪91個省人名的分布，他表明亞平寧山脈——意大利的脊梁——在幾千年的時間里形成了一個自然的遷徙障礙，
resulting in genetically distinct populations on either side.
由此導致山兩邊人類群體的基因差別。
And because he could also measure variation in blood proteins, such as that between A, B and O blood types,
由于他也能測量血液蛋白質的變化，如A、B、O血型的血液蛋白質變化，
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.
所以他還收集了帕爾馬河谷各地居民的血樣，以證明相關個體之間的婚姻導致了這些城鎮之間的許多遺傳差異。
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