What makes the British?

21 April 2013

In the current issue of Oxford Today, Sir Walter Bodmer, Honorary Fellow of Hertford, and Professor Mark Robinson, our lecturer in Archaeology, discuss a ground-breaking interdisciplinary project by Oxford researchers to produce a detailed genetic inventory of the British population. For Sir Walter, the most interesting aspect is the possibility of ‘future research into the genetic components of susceptibility to a number of diseases’; for Mark the data gives clues about the history of the Romano-British population after the fall of the Roman Empire in Britain. There are political aspects too: what of the fact that people in Northern Ireland show such a strong genetic connection with their neighbours in the south, or the connections between Cornish and Welsh genes and those of modern France?