Guido Barbujani

Guido Barbujani (Adria, 1955) is an Italian geneticist and writer. He has worked at the State University of New York as well as the universities of Padua and Bologna. Since 1996 he has been professor of Genetics and Population Genetics in the Department of Life Sciences and Biotechnology at the University of Ferrara, where he has been working on different aspects of human genetic diversity and evolutionary biology. He and his co-researcher Robert R. Sokal are the first scientists to have produced a statistical method for comparing genetic and linguistic data and thus to reconstruct the evolutionary history of human populations. His studies of DNA and distribution of genetic differences have demonstrated that the traditional concept of race fails to provide a satisfactory account of human diversity. He is president of the Italian Genetics Association and editor of the journals Human Heredity and BMC Genetics. Moreover, he has published four novels and numerous essays, among them L’invenzione delle razze (Bompiani, 2006), winner of the 2007 Merk Serono Prize.