Walter Bodmer


Sir Walter Fred Bodmer is a German-born British human geneticist.

Early life

Bodmer was born in Frankfurt, Germany. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and went on to study the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge as a student of Clare College, Cambridge. He was awarded his PhD in 1959 from Cambridge for research on population genetics in the house mouse and Primula vulgaris supervised by Ronald Fisher.

Career and research

In 1961 Bodmer joined Joshua Lederberg's laboratory in the genetics department of Stanford University as a postdoctoral researcher, continuing his work on population genetics. 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 the University of Oxford.
Bodmer was Vice-President of the Royal Institution from 1981 until 1982.
Bodmer developed models for population genetics and worked 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. The report was instrumental in leading to the creation of the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science in 1987.
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 and then director general of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund. He was also chancellor of the University of Salford, England and principal of Hertford College, Oxford.
In 2005, Bodmer was appointed to lead a £2.3 million project by the Wellcome Trust at the University of Oxford to examine the genetic makeup of the United Kingdom – the People of the British Isles project. He was joined by Oxford Professor Peter Donnelly and the Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow Lon Cardon. 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 predominantly from Danish Vikings while the Orkney Islands were settled by Norwegian Vikings. This research was most recently presented at the Galton Institute's conference on 'New Light on Old Britons' in 2019. Bodmer had previously worked with the Galton Institute as its president from 2008 to 2014.
He has been head of the cancer and immunogenetics laboratory in the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Oxford since 1996. Research interests of the laboratory include the fundamental genetics and biology of colorectal cancer.

Honours and awards

Bodmer has won numerous awards including:
His certificate of election to the Royal Society reads:

Personal life

Bodmer's father was Jewish so the family were obliged to leave Nazi Germany; in 1938, they settled in Manchester, England. In 1956, Walter Bodmer married Julia Bodmer ; she also became a well-known geneticist. They had two sons and a daughter.