Work on French computer program for construction of pedigrees

George Fraser recorded, 'Before going to Newfoundland in 1973, I had already been collaborating with the INSERM Unit U88 (Medical Informatics and Biostatistics) at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. I had made several visits and I had brought with me a large pedigree compiled by Lionel Penrose, together with his ideas how to make it accessible to mathematical analysis with respect to kinship coefficients, inbreeding and other parameters. Lionel was pursuing his ideas using pieces of string, but the members of INSERM Unit U88 became interested in the matter and developed computer programs for such analyses, including a programme for drawing pedigrees without any limitation of size (C. Garçon, M.-F. Landre, and M.-T. Valat, 'Traitement de généalogies', Revue d’Informatique Médicale, Vol. 3 (1972), see PP/GRF/E.28). Penrose died in May 1972 and it was in 1971 that his skills in pedigree drawing, among his many other skills with his hands which he put to good scientific use, contributed to the development of the Paris pedigree-drawing programme which is the ancestor of some of the programmes which are in use today'.

Over 1975, 1976 and 1979, Fraser spent the equivalent of a year in Paris, collaborating in an analysis, using the computer programs which they had developed, of a large Newfoundland family of over 3,000 individuals, in which a concentration of common variable immunodeficiency, Hodgkin's disease, and other malignancies including embryonic tumours had been found.