Francisco Ayala
Francisco José Ayala Pereda (born March 12, 1934) is a Spanish-American biologist and philosopher at the University of California, Irvine. He is a former Dominican priest, ordained in 1960, but left the priesthood that same year.
He is known for his research on population and evolutionary genetics, and has been called the \"Renaissance Man of Evolutionary Biology\". His \"discoveries have opened up new approaches to the prevention and treatment of diseases that affect hundreds of millions of individuals worldwide\", including demonstrating the reproduction of Trypanosoma cruzi, the agent of Chagas disease, is mostly the product of cloning, and that only a few clones account for most of this widespread, mostly untreatable South American disease that affects 16 million to 18 million people.
