TURIN – Farewell to Alberto Piazza,
who dismantled the myth of human races

Along with his colleagues Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Paolo Menozzi, Turin geneticist Alberto Piazza was credited 30 years ago with dismantling the myth of human races. “Humanity cannot be divided into races,” Piazza explained in an interview a few years ago. We all belong to one species, the geneticist recalled. Director of the Department of Genetics, Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Turin and former president of the Academy of Sciences, Piazza, who died last week at 82, was a landmark in the study of human genetics and immunogenetics.
“I was born in Turin in 1941 to a Jewish family. The first years of my life were difficult because we had to flee first to Gressoney and from there in 1943 to Switzerland where, with my grandparents and my mother –my father had already fled along a different route. We stayed for some time in an internment camp that, fortunately, had nothing to do with concentration camps lagers. Later. I was temporarily adopted by a family in Basel,” Alberto Piazza recounted.
After following his own scientific passion, a meeting with Cavalli-Sforza at an international conference in France came in 1972. “Later Cavalli-Sforza invited me to Stanford, where he was professor emeritus and did research on population genetics.” Hence the beginning of the study that led to the demonstration of the nonexistence of races. This work lasted 15 years and culminated in 1993 in the publication, together with Cavalli-Sforza and Menozzi, of The History and Geography of Human Genes.”
In a recent interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Piazza dwelt on the idea of the Italian people. “Italian DNA does not exist,” he stressed. “We are Italian because we recognize ourselves in a culture, in a history, in a geography, certainly not because we are genetically different from people from other countries.”