Walter Bodmer

Sir Walter Bodmer FRS (born 10 January 1936 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany ) is a German-born British human geneticist. His father being Jewish, the family left Germany in 1938 and settled in Manchester. Bodmer has developed models for population genetics and done work on the human leukocyte antigen system and the use of somatic cell hybrids for human linkage studies. In 1985 he chaired a Royal Society committee which wrote The Bodmer Report; this has been credited with starting the movement for the public understanding of science. .

Reading Mathematics at Cambridge University Walter Bodmer worked with Sir Ronald Fisher, moving into statistics. After receiving his PhD at Cambridge University he continued as a fellow. In 1961 he joined Prof. Joshua Lederberg's laboratory in the Genetics Department of Stanford University, continuing his research on population genetics, using the computing facilities that Stanford could offer. In 1962 Walter Bodmer was appointed to the faculty at Stanford. He left Stanford University in 1970 to become the first Professor of Genetics at Oxford University .

Bodmer became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974 and was knighted in 1986. Walter Bodmer was one of the first to suggest the idea of the Human Genome Project. In 1987 he received the Ellison-Cliffe Medal from the Royal Society of Medicine. He was the director of research (1979–1991) and then Director General (1991–1996) of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund. He was also Chancellor of the University of Salford, England (1995–2005; succeeded by Sir Martin Harris) and Principal of Hertford College, Oxford (1996–2005; succeeded by Dr. John Landers). In 1988, he was awarded an Honorary Degree (Doctor of Science) by the University of Bath.

He is currently Head of the Cancer and Immunogenetics Laboratory in the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Oxford. Research interests of the laboratory include the fundamental genetics and biology of colorectal cancer.

In 2005, Sir Walter Bodmer was appointed to lead a £2.3 million project (roughly 4.5 million USD) by the Wellcome Trust at Oxford University to examine the genetic makeup of the United Kingdom - the People of the British Isles project. Professor Sir Walter Bodmer was joined by Oxford Professor Peter Donnelly (a population genetics and statistics expert) and the Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow Professor Lon Cardon. Professor Bodmer said "Our aim is to characterise the genetic make-up of the British population and relate this to the historical and archaeological evidence." The researchers presented some of their findings to the public via the Channel 4 television series "Faces of Britain." On 14 April 2007, Channel 4 in Britain aired a program that highlighted the study’s then-current findings. The project took DNA samples from hundreds of volunteers throughout Britain, seeking tell-tale fragments of DNA that would reveal the biological traces of successive waves of colonisers — Celts, Saxons, Vikings, etc. — in various parts of Britain. The findings showed that the Viking invasion of Britain was predominately from Danish Vikings while the Orkney Islands were settled by Norwegian Vikings.