Armand Marie Leroi

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Armand Leroi was born in Wellington, New Zealand on the 16 July 1964. A Dutch citizen, his youth was spent in New Zealand, South Africa and Canada. He was awarded a BSc. by Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada in 1989, and a Ph.D. by the University of California, Irvine in 1993. This was followed by postdoctoral work at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York using the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as an experimental organism.

In 2001, he was appointed lecturer at Imperial College London. He has written one book entitled Mutants: On the Form, Varieties and Errors of Human Body for which he was awarded the Guardian First Book Award in 2004. In 2004 he adapted his book into a television documentary series for Britain' Channel 4 entitled Human Mutants.

Leroi has presented two other TV documentary series for Channel 4: "Alien Worlds" in 2005 and "What makes us Human" in 2006. Despite his TV appearances, Leroi expressed scepticism of the motivations of television creatives in an email exchange with director Martin Durkin in which he said "left to their own devices, TV producers simply cannot be trusted to tell the truth".[1]

In 2005, Leroi published an article in the New York Times entitled "A Family Tree in Every Gene", which argued for the usefulness of racial types in medical genetics.