Armand Marie Leroi Information & Armand Marie Leroi Links at HealthHaven.com

Armand Marie Leroi is an evolutionary developmental biologist at Imperial College in London who 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 Genetic Variety and the Human Body ^[1] 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".^[2]

He is also known as one of the first testers of the beneficial acclimation hypothesis. In 2005, Leroi published an article in the New York Times entitled "A Family Tree in Every Gene",^[3] which argued for the usefulness of racial types in medical genetics.

It was found during the making of "What makes us Human" that his ASPM genetic make up is Heterozygous. That is to say, he has one copy of the recent variant and one copy of the old ASPM allele.

In January 2009 Leroi presented the BBC4 documentary 'What Darwin Didn't Know' (available on dvd). It is a fresh and undogmatic approach to the theory of evolution.^{[neutrality disputed]} He asks profound questions about the merits of the modern theory of evolution and surprises with unorthodox answers such as "the theory is inadequate because it is not predictive".