The human geneticist Bryan Sykes, who has died aged 73, pushed forward the analysis of inherited conditions such as brittle bone disease and double-jointedness, and was one of the first to extract DNA from ancient bone.
The same Bryan Sykes, holder of a personal chair at Oxford University, analyzed hair supposedly taken from mythical hominids such as the Bigfoot and Yeti, and announced the results in a three-part television series. His delight in science and enthusiasm for communicating it to popular audiences were both aspects of an expansive personality that alternately inspired and exasperated his colleagues.
Sykes was not the only one to realize that the ability to read sequences of DNA code opened up the possibility of tracing human ancestry to our early origins. He was exceptional, however, in seeing that the wider public would connect emotionally to these stories if the dry details of the science could be presented accessibly. His book The Seven Daughters of Eve (2001) proposed that every living European could trace his or her ancestry to one of seven women living between 8,500 and 45,000 years ago. They, in turn, would share descent from a single Eve, who lived in Africa even earlier. He gave the seven women names and, anticipating peoples desire to know which tribe they belonged to, the same year set up the first direct-to-consumer genetic testing company, Oxford Ancestors, as an Oxford University spinout.
Sykes began this work long before modern methods of whole-genome DNA sequencing were available. When, in the late 1980s, he, Erica Hagelberg and Robert Hedges of Oxfords Research Laboratory for Archaeology first extracted DNA from bones up to 12,000 years old, they opted to focus on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). There are more than 1,000 mitochondria in each cell but only one nucleus (where most of our DNA resides), increasing the chances of retrieving mtDNA. But Sykes soon appreciated that it has another property. It is inherited largely unchanged in the maternal line over thousands of years, while nuclear DNA is mixed with every generation. To test whether it would be possible to use mtDNA to trace distant ancestors, Sykes first confirmed that domesticated golden hamsters from numerous locations, which he had heard were all descended from a single wild-caught female, had the same signature in their mtDNA.
Sykes went on to use this method to solve the mystery of the origins of islanders scattered throughout the Pacific Ocean: whether they had arrived from the Americas, as Thor Heyerdahl had suggested on the basis of the 1947 voyage of the Kon-Tiki raft, or from Asia. Receiving hospital treatment on Raratonga in the Cook Islands after a motorcycle accident while on holiday in the mid-90s, Sykes realized he could resolve this uncertainty using mtDNA. He went on to collect samples from Pacific islands and Pacific Rim countries, and established that Polynesia was in fact entirely settled from Asia.
In 1987 he won a British Association for the Advancement of Science media fellowship that enabled him to spend seven weeks working with Channel 4 News. The lessons he learned about what makes a good story came to the fore in Seven Daughters and his subsequent books.
Adams Curse (2003) drew some controversial conclusions about the influence of the Y chromosome on male behaviour, but also covered studies that traced descent via Y chromosomes. These pass from father to son, like British surnames, though without the uncertainty introduced by nonpaternity events. When the chairman of the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, Sir Richard Sykes, wondered if the two of them might be related, Bryan collected DNA from dozens of Sykeses in Britain. He discovered that more than half of them shared the same unusual Y chromosome variant, suggesting a single founding father in Yorkshire in the 13th or 14th century.
His collaboration with enthusiasts searching for the Bigfoot and Yeti raised eyebrows even higher. Hairs from bits of mystery creatures that had long lain in museums and temples made their way to his lab. The three-part Channel 4 series Bigfoot Files (2015) maintained the suspense to the end, but all the samples proved to come from known animal species. A hasty claim that a Yeti specimen was a match to a prehistoric polar bear proved to be a case of mistaken identity. For Sykes it was all education as entertainment he never seriously believed that such creatures existed, but sought to encourage curiosity rather than squashing it.
Born in London, Bryan was the son of Frank Sykes, an accountant, and his wife, Irene. He attended the independent boys school Eltham college, near his home in south-east London, and developed passions for the natural world, experiments and inventions. He also excelled at cross-country running, rugby and swimming.
He studied biochemistry at the University of Liverpool, and did a PhD at the University of Bristol on the connective tissue protein elastin. He arrived at Oxford in 1973 as a research fellow in the Nuffield department of orthopaedic surgery, continuing to work on elastin and collagen. By the time he was appointed lecturer in molecular pathology in 1987, he was deploying new genetic techniques to explore inherited disorders of bone and connective tissue. His collagen genetics group moved from orthopaedic surgery to Oxfords newly established Institute of Molecular Medicine, founded by the geneticist Sir David Weatherall, who was an important mentor. He was appointed to a personal chair in human genetics in 1997, and formally retired in 2016.
Sykess expertise in bone led to his involvement in the effort to extract DNA from ancient specimens. As his interest in studies of human populations developed, he recruited lab members who worked in that area alongside those who continued his pathological studies. Colleagues remember the lab as being unusually collaborative, though occasionally disrupted by TV cameras, and Sykes himself as encouraging and supportive. He took them all to Scotland in 1998 to assist with the collection of samples for his work on prehistoric migration into Britain (published as Blood of the Isles, 2006). A keen fisherman, he got out his rods in the bar of their hotel to teach them how to cast a fly.
Sykes was extremely smart and a brilliant communicator, with a streak of mischief: he didnt turn a hair when Italian colleagues casually invited him to access the bone store at Pompeii by climbing over a fence (they had arrived before opening time), and there was always champagne in the lab when anyone published a paper.
Sykes met Sue Foden when she was a student in Oxford, and they were married in 1978. Though the marriage was annulled in 1984, he and Sue remained close and had a son, Richard, born in 1991. His later marriage to Janis Wilson ended in divorce. In 2007 he collaborated with the Danish artist Ulla Plougmand on an exhibition featuring the seven daughters of Eve, and their subsequent relationship lasted until the end of his life. In later years, as his health deteriorated, Bryan was increasingly supported and cared for by Sue. She, Ulla and Richard survive him.
Bryan Clifford Sykes, geneticist, born 9 September 1947; died 10 December 2020.
(Note: The above flowers are the Santa Clause Shasta Rose.)
(Note: The above flowers are the Santa Clause Shasta Rose.)
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