Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (1922–2018)

An obituary of author Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza who died on Aug 31, 2018 is presented. At age 20 he began publishing research papers on quantitative measurements of bacterial virulence. In this field he worked with his classmate Giovanni Magni, performing experiments using mice inoculated with virul...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Human biology 2019-09, Vol.90 (2), p.89-95
Main Author: Fort, Joaquim
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age
Animals
Archaeology
Bacteria
Bacteriology
Blood groups
Deaths
Deoxyribonucleic acid
DNA
E coli
Evolution
Experiments
IN MEMORIAM
Nobel prizes
Population genetics
Publishing
Researchers
Simulation
Toxicity
Virulence
World War II
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Summary:An obituary of author Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza who died on Aug 31, 2018 is presented. At age 20 he began publishing research papers on quantitative measurements of bacterial virulence. In this field he worked with his classmate Giovanni Magni, performing experiments using mice inoculated with virulent bacteria. They discovered a linear relationship between mean death time and the logarithm of dose (i.e., the number of bacteria used for inoculations) and proposed an interpretation that isolated the two factors of virulence: the reproduction time of the bacteria and their toxicity (which are related, respectively, to the slope and the intercept of the linear relationship) (Cavalli and Magni 1947). At the end of World War II no jobs were offfered at Italian universities, and Cavalli-Sforza worked as a doctor in a hospital during 1944-1945. Discouraged by the lack of drugs to help patients, he found a job at the Istituto Sieroterapico Milanese, a pharmaceutical institute in Milan (Cavalli-Sforza and Cavalli-Sforza 2005).
ISSN:0018-7143
1534-6617
DOI:10.13110/humanbiology.90.2.01