布赖恩·赛克斯

布莱恩·C·赛克斯（英语：Bryan Clifford Sykes，1947年9月19日—2020年12月10日）是一位英国遗传学家和科普作家，牛津大学沃弗森学院人类遗传学荣休教授，主要科普作品有《夏娃的七个女儿——追踪人类遗传先祖的科学故事》（The Seven Daughters of Eve）、《亚当的诅咒——没有男人的未来》（Adam's Curse: A Future Without Men）等。

Bryan Clifford Sykes (9 September 1947 – 10 December 2020) was a British geneticist, university professor, popular-science writer, and genetic genealogy company executive. He received a fellowship at Wolfson College and a personal chair, later emeritus professorship, in human genetics at the University of Oxford.

Sykes published the first report on retrieving DNA from ancient bone (Nature, 1989). He was involved in a number of high-profile archaeogenetics (ancient DNA) cases, including that of Ötzi the Iceman.

Sykes is best known outside the community of geneticists for his two most popular books – The Seven Daughters of Eve (2001), and Blood of the Isles / Saxons, Vikings and Celts (2006) – both on the investigation of human history and prehistory through studies of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). However, many of his conclusions in these works about European populations and their histories have become dubious or have been invalidated by more recent advances in whole-genome sequencing for more detailed archaeogenetics. He also suggested an American accountant named Tom Robinson was a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, a claim that was subsequently disproved.

Of more lasting significance, besides contributions to archaeogenetic technology, his mtDNA work in the Pacific demonstrated that the historical populating of Oceania took place entirely from Asia, dispelling a decades-persistent fringe theory of origins on the western coast of the Americas.

Early life and education

Bryan Sykes was born 9 September 1947 in south-east London, to Frank (an accountant) and Irene Sykes.

Sykes was educated at Eltham College, received his BSc from the University of Liverpool, his PhD from the University of Bristol, and his DSc from the University of Oxford (to which he was admitted in 1973). Originally focusing on bone and connective-tissue disorders, in Oxford's orthopaedic surgery department, he did early work on collagen and elastin genetics.

Career

Sykes became an Oxford lecturer in molecular pathology in 1987. Although much of his academic output remained focused on heritable skeletal disorders at the university's then-new Institute of Molecular Medicine, his genetic research broadened.

In 1989, Sykes published his research team's success in extracting intact genetic material (in the form of mtDNA) from bones up to 12,000 years old in the journal Nature. This marked a pivot from his medical-related work to the nascent archeological field of archaeogenetics. Other key participants in this team (coalescing through their work together at the John Radcliffe Hospital) were Erika Hagelberg and Robert E. M. Hedges of the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art at the Oxford's School of Archaeology. Hedges later became a leading scholar of the molecular analysis of ancient diets and of archaeological environments, following his earlier roles in the development radiocarbon dating and then the application of accelerator mass spectrometry in archaeology. Hagelberg published, as Sykes would, on mtDNA's use in establishing prehistoric human population movements, and made high-profile strides in forensic analysis of degraded genetic samples.

Sykes received a personal-chair professorship in human genetics at Oxford in 1997.

From 1999 to 2016, he published a number of popularized-science books for a broad audience, to considerable attention (not all of it positive, especially from fellow academics). Starting with The Human Inheritance (1999), much of this material was focused on explaining the uses of genetics in understanding the history of human populations, especially in Europe (The Seven Daughters of Eve, 2001; Blood of the Isles, 2006) and North America (DNA USA, 2011). In more academic work, he turned his mtDNA lens on the Pacific and East Asia, though these efforts did not result in books.