Background
A Dutch citizen, Leroy was born in Wellington, New Zealand.
A Dutch citizen, Leroy was born in Wellington, New Zealand.
He was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree by Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada in 1989, and a Doctor of Philosophy by the University of California, Irvine in 1993.
His youth was spent in New Zealand, South Africa and Canada. 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.
In 2004 he adapted his book into a television documentary series for Britain" Channel 4 entitled Human Mutants.
Leroi has presented two other television documentary series for Channel 4: "Alien Worlds" in 2005 and "What Makes Us Human" in 2006. Despite his television appearances, Leroi has expressed scepticism about the truthfulness of television creatives.
In an email exchange with television director Martin Durkin, concerning the latter"s documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, Leroi wrote: "left to their own devices, television producers simply cannot be trusted to tell the truth". 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", which argued for the usefulness of racial types in medical genetics.
lieutenant was found during the making of "What Makes Us Human" that his ASPM gene locus 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, which charts the progress in the field of Evolutionary Theory since the original publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859.
In January 2010 Leroi presented the BBC4 documentary Aristotle"s Lagoon, filmed on the Greek island of Lesvos and suggesting that Aristotle was the world"s first scientist and biologist.