Marcello Siniscalco: Archives

The following is an interim description which may change when detailed cataloguing takes place in future:

Please note that this archive contains patient data that is highly sensitive in nature. When the archive is catalogued, the patient data will require closure for the lifetime of the data subjects in accordance with the 1998 Data Protection Act. For fuller information on how the library handles sensitive archival data, see our policy on Access to personal data within our research collections.

The archive includes:

The content of two laptops used by Siniscalco, including documentation relating to his work on schizophrenia, myopia, and population genetics. The latter including studies of genomic diversity on Sardinia, following on from the work of L.L. Cavalli-Sforza and colleagues done in the early 1970s.

The content of 6 CD-ROMS, mainly relating to DNA and inheritance.

Scanned copies of papers by Siniscalco.

20th Century

c.11,000 digital files

Presented to the library at Wellcome Collection in 2016.

Marcello Siniscalco was an Italian geneticist, born in Naples in 1924. After studying at the University of Naples, Siniscalsco moved to London in 1952 to take up a position as British Council Research Fellow at the Galton Laboratory, University College London. At UCL he met and began working with J. B. S. Haldane, a relationship that would continue until Haldane's death in 1964. After completion of his Fellowship, Siniscalco returned to work at the University of Naples. In 1962, he accepted an invitation to found and chair a new Department of Genetics at Leiden University, a post he held for the following eight years.

In 1973, Siniscalso moved to the United States, where he would spend the next 20 years of his life. He had first travelled there in 1968 to take up a post as Visiting Professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, and went on to work at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Cornell University. During this time he spent every summer on the island of Sardinia, researching population genetics. In 1989 Siniscalco returned to Italy, where he set up the Sardinian Center for Studies on Genome Diversity at the University of Cagliari, fulfilling a long held ambition. During this time, he was closely involved in the Human Genome Organization (HUGO), and collaborated extensively with Walter Bodmer and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund.

This collection is currently uncatalogued and cannot be ordered online. Requests to view uncatalogued material are considered on a case by case basis. Please contact collections@wellcomecollection.org for more details.