He and his colleagues have just extracted and sequenced DNA from Equus quagga, an extinct zebra-like relative of the horse from southern Africa. Allan Wilson is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a pioneer in molecular evolutionary biology. So let us go back to the start of the field, back to the 1980s when the idea of recovering DNA from long-dead organisms was very much in the realm of science fiction. But Pääbo was not always the paleogenomics powerhouse that he is today. His influence is undoubtedly more predominant now since he won a Nobel Prize for his discoveries of extinct hominins, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, and for his contributions to understanding human evolution. With a heavy Swedish accent, his voice is soft and soothing, and it stands in marked contrast to the complete unrivaled power he holds over the field of ancient DNA research. This is how scientists in the discipline fondly, and sometimes not so fondly, describe Pääbo. Svante Pääbo, he is “The Dark Lord of Ancient DNA,” one of his colleagues told me.
Jones, author of Ancient DNA: The Making of a Celebrity Science, dives into the historical context of Svante Pääbo’s contributions to DNA research in this original piece. How has the study of ancient DNA been altered by Svante Pääbo’s work? Elizabeth D. If you enjoyed this Distinguished Science Lecture, please show your support by making a donation.In fall of 2022, Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution. You play a vital part in our commitment to promote science and reason. Drawing on genetic and fossil clues, Pääbo explores what is known about the origin of modern humans and their relationship to the Neanderthals and describes the fierce debate surrounding the nature of the two species’ interactions. We learn that Neanderthal genes offer a unique window into the lives of our hominin relatives and may hold the key to unlocking the mystery of why humans survived while Neanderthals went extinct. In Neanderthal Man he tells the story of his mission to answer the question of what we can learn from the genes of our closest evolutionary relative, culminating in his sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2009. Svante Pääbo is the founder of the field of ancient DNA and is the director of the department of genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.
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