ABOVE: BRYAN SYKES; © ISTOCK.COM, KTSIMAGE
Acclaimed author, geneticist, and one of the first scientists to publish on the retrieval and amplification of DNA from ancient bones, Bryan Sykes died on December 10, 2020, at the age of 73. His wife Ulla Plougmand, a painter, confirmed his death to The New York Times and did not provide a cause, though there have been reports that he had been in increasingly poor health in his last years.
Sykes was born in London in 1947. Following the completion of his molecular biology PhD at the University of Bristol in 1973, he came to the University of Oxford to research collagen and elastin. Over the next 15 years, he began incorporating genetic analysis into his research, The Guardian reports.
In the 1980s, Sykes was among the first to determine that mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is passed along from mother to child, could be ...
