Obituary: Derek F. Roberts (1925-2016).

Derek F. Roberts was born on July 20, 1925 in London, within the sound of Bow Bells. During his long and distinguished career, Roberts established the Human Genetics Program at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and directed the cytogenetics, biochemical genetics and HLA facilities that provided diagnostic tools for Medical Genetics at the Medical School. His research in human genetics and biological anthropology spanned almost five decades during which he was a formative figure in the development and application of population genetics to physical anthropology. He published more than 400 articles and helped revitalize human biology in post war United Kingdom. Derek Roberts was a talented pianist and musician until a World War II accident ended his promising musical career. During the war he served from 1943 in the Lincolnshire Regiment and was discharged in 1946. In 1948, Derek Roberts completed his Bachelor’s degree (with honors) from Cambridge University in Geography and his MA from the same institution in 1952. While at Cambridge, he worked for the American War Graves Commission excavating remains of American airmen and identifying them using dental records and other anatomical features. In 1953, he received his DPhil at Oxford University. From 1954 to 1963, he served as University Demonstrator in Physical Anthropology, Oxford University, under the chairmanship of Wilfrid E. Le Gros Clark. Roberts received formal training in genetics from E.B. Ford an eco-geneticist at Oxford. In 1953–1954, he conducted a world-wide analysis of the geographic distribution of body morphology and climatic conditions. He followed up this world wide analysis with a highly significant field research program in northern Sudan on people of extreme physiques—the Dinka Nilotics. This extremely difficult field research in a politically unstable region of Africa was funded by WHO. In 1960, Roberts spent one year on a Fulbright fellowship receiving postdoctoral training in human genetics under the guidance of James Neel at Ann Arbor, Michigan. This experience further expanded Roberts’ interests and expertise in anthropological and medical genetics. In 1961, because of a volcanic eruption, the entire island population of Tristan da Cunha was transplanted to the United Kingdom. A group from the Medical Research Council (MRC) was organized to evaluate the health of the Tristan inhabitants. At that time, Roberts initiated the collection of genetic, genealogical and demographic data but was unable to complete the analyses until after his return to Oxford from Seattle in 1964. He created file cards for every inhabitant of Tristan and analyzed the effects of unique historical events, such as founder effects and major population bottlenecks (Roberts, 1971). These population reductions had dramatic consequences on subsequent contributions of genes from the ancestral founders to contemporary the population (Roberts, 1973; Thompson & Roberts, 1980). This research fleshed out Sewall Wright’s theories concerning founder effect and genetic drift in small, island, human populations (Roberts, 1968a,b). With the return of the islanders to Tristan and the subsequent technological developments in molecular genetics, Roberts collaborated with Himla Soodyall and Mark Stoneking, using informative mitochondrial and Y-chromosome markers to reconstruct the maternal and paternal evolutionary history of Tristan (Soodyall et al., 1997; Soodyall, Nebel, Morar, & Jenkins, 2003). In 1963, Derek Roberts accepted a position of visiting professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle to develop a program in physical anthropology. During his stay in the United States, Roberts summarized his views about the state of physical anthropology in the United States in a provocative lecture at the N.W. Anthropological Association meetings in Pullman, Washington (Roberts, 1966). In the publication that followed, he prefaced his diagnoses and treatment of the diseased field as follows: