Together with colleagues Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Paolo Menozzi, the Turin geneticist Alberto Piazza had the merit of demolishing the myth of human races thirty years ago. «Humanity cannot be divided into races», Piazza explained in an interview a few years ago. We all belong to a single species, the geneticist reminded us.
Director of the department of genetics, biology and biochemistry of the University of Turin, former president of the Academy of Sciences, Piazza, who passed away yesterday at the age of 82, was a point of reference in the study of human genetics and immunogenetics.
«I was born in Turin in 1941 and I belong 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 followed another route) we remained for some time in a camp of internment which, fortunately, had nothing to do with the concentration camps. I was later temporarily adopted by a family in Basel,” the geneticist said.
After following his scientific passion, he met Cavalli-Sforza at an international conference in France in 1972. «Later Cavalli-Sforza invited me to go 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 non-existence of races. A work that lasted 15 years and culminated in 1993 in the publication, together with Cavalli-Sforza and Menozzi, of the volume «The History and Geography of Human Genes».
In a recent interview with Corriere della Sera Piazza focused on the idea of the Italian people. «Italian DNA does not exist», he underlined. «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».
