David W. Fulker, Professor of Statistical Genetics at the Institute of
Psychiatry, London University, died from cancer of the pancreas on
July 9 aged 61. He was born on March 8, 1937.
David Fulker did not publish his first scientific paper until he was
nearly 30 but he went on to become one of the world's leading figures
in behaviour genetics. At the time of his death he was still producing
some of the most exciting and innovative work on the borders between
quantitative and molecular genetics.
>From a modest background - he was the son of a Welsh former miner -
Fulker grew up in London and did not immediately appear destined for
the higher reaches of academic life. On leaving school he trained as a
teacher and then worked variously as a chemistry teacher and a
photographer before enrolling for a BSc in psychology at Birkbeck
College, London University. He graduated, aged 27, with first-class
honours and then did something highly unconventional for a British
psychologist in the 1960s: he embarked on a career in genetics.
His masters degree at Birmingham introduced him to the biometrical
approach, the use of statistical methods to assess the relative
contributions of inheritance and environment to continuous traits
(such as, in humans, height, weight or blood pressure). The genetics
of such traits tends to be complicated, and the work contrasted with
much of the rest of genetic research at that time, which tended to
focus on simple Mendelian (ie, present or absent) characteristics.
Fulker's first major study, carried out under the supervision of
J. L. Jinks, was on mating speed in fruit flies. It was published in
Science in 1966 and immediately had an impact on the thinking of
behavioural geneticists. Fulker went on to complete his PhD in
Birmingham, and with Jinks published in 1970 a paper in Psychological
Bulletin which proposed extending the biometrical genetic approach to
the study of human behaviour. It proved a classic in the field.
Fulker remained at Birmingham University as a lecturer in the
psychology department until 1975, when he was offered a post at the
Institute of Psychiatry in London. He was appointed senior lecturer at
the institute and director of its animal laboratories at the Bethlem
Royal Hospital.
His years at the institute were highly productive and he produced much
important research, establishing that there is a substantial genetic
influence on a wide variety of behaviours both in rodents and in
man. But his work also showed that human traits, such as personality
type or susceptibility to alcoholism or depression, depend on an
interplay between genes and environment. These results were achieved
by using new analytical approaches developed in association with
colleagues such as J. C. DeFries.
By the early 1980s Fulker's international standing was
unquestioned. In 1982 he was elected president of the Behavior
Genetics Association and in 1985 he became executive editor of the
journal Behavior Genetics. However, by this time Fulker's field,
always a very specialised one, had become unfashionable and rather
neglected among academic psychologists in Britain. By contrast it was
thriving in the United States, where research funds were plentiful.
In 1985 Fulker accepted a professorship at the University of
Colorado's Institute for Behavioral Genetics at Boulder, one of the
world's leading centres, and he moved there with his wife, Angela
Elliot, and her daughter Katherine. In 1986, their own daughter
Rosanna was born.
The family were soon settled and Fulker's reputation attracted
research funds which enabled him to assemble a larger scientific team
than had ever been feasible in Britain. He began working on a problem
which had now become vital, how to combine biometrical or quantitative
genetics with the burgeoning study of molecular genetics.
This was difficult enough in studies of animal behaviour, where
experimenters could at least design breeding programmes to discover
which piece of DNA is inherited along with what type of
behaviour. With humans, the task was even more complex, because we
have what is to geneticists the vexing habit of following our own
breeding programmes. Fulker's solution was to adapt an approach based
on regression analysis that he and DeFries had developed earlier to
analyse twin studies.
With his former PhD student L. R. Cardon, Fulker showed that it was
theoretically possible to detect those DNA markers that can predict
similarities between pairs of siblings with respect to quantitative
traits. They went on, with others at the University of Colorado, to
use the method to find a gene on chromosome 6 that contributes to
reading difficulties.
Meanwhile in Britain, behaviour genetics had been rejuvenating. The
Medical Research Council funded a new centre for social, genetic and
developmental psychiatric research at the Institute of Psychiatry in
London in 1995, under the directorship of Professor Sir Michael
Rutter, and it began recruiting academic stars including several
prominent Americans. Fulker was offered and accepted a new London
chair in statistical genetics in 1996.
Greatly enthusiastic about his new position and still brimming with
novel ideas about methods of identifying genes for behavioural traits,
he seemed to be hitting his scientific peak as he was entering his
seventh decade. Tragically, illness intervened and Britain was cheated
of the benefit of a successful exercise in reversing the brain drain.
Friends and family will remember Fulker as an unassuming and kindly
man who was invariably good company. Despite his intellect he was
never intimidating - except perhaps for dinner party guests marvelling
at his culinary skills and knowledge of wine, and wondering how they
were going to repay his hospitality.
He leaves his widow, daughter and stepdaughter.
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The unnamed author is Professor Peter McGuffin, former Chair,
Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Wales College of
Medicine, newly appointed Director of the Centre for Social, Genetic
and Developmental Psychiatric Research, replacing Sir Michael Rutter
who has retired from that post.