Genetics, Cancer, and the Limits of Longevity

Sir Walter Bodmer, now in his late 80s, still goes to his Oxford laboratory every day. He was born in Frankfurt in 1936 and fled Nazi Germany with his family at age two and a half. His father, a successful Jewish physician, had to retake medical exams in England and became a general practitioner instead of the academic clinician he wanted to be. Bodmer remembers nothing of Germany, but he refused to learn English at first, having just learned to speak German. He eventually won a scholarship to study mathematics at Cambridge, a path he fell into partly because a teacher told him the math stream was where boys got scholarships to Oxford and Cambridge. He did not become a professional mathematician — he says he realized he could never be as good as his supervisors, who included the future president of the Royal Society and a Nobel laureate from Pakistan. Instead, a lecture series from the statistician David Cox led him to the work of R.A. Fisher, who was developing the mathematical theory of population genetics. Bodmer went to Fisher and asked to be his PhD student. Fisher said yes.

What Cancer Actually Is