Imagine: An Interview with Svante Paabo:
Svante Paabo works on the edge of what's possible. He ignites our imagination, unlocking tightly held secrets in ancient remains. By patiently and meticulously working out techniques to extract genetic information from skin, teeth, bones, and excrement, Paabo has become the leader of the ancient DNA pack. Sloths, cave bears, moas, wooly mammoths, extinct bees, and Neanderthals--all have succumbed to his scrutiny.
Paabo (see Image 1) broke ground in 1985, working surreptitiously at night in the lab where he conducted his unrelated PhD research, to extract, clone, and sequence DNA from an Egyptian mummy.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
One of Charles R. Knight's wonderful paintings of woolly mammoths walking through the snow of ancient Europe. On display at the Field Museum in Chicago.
When did the last woolly mammoths die?
There is no easy answer to the question. In its heyday the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) was…
Meet Nifty Fifty evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro who spends her days peering into the past. Her work in the emerging research field of ancient DNA takes her on a fascinating journey through time - collecting and studying the genetic samples of giant mammoths, saber-toothed cats, mastodons,…
Even extinction and the passing of millennia are no barriers to clever geneticists. In the past few years, scientists have managed to sequence the complete genome of a prehistoric human and produced "first drafts" of the mammoth and Neanderthal genomes. More controversially, some groups have even…
In a stunning finding, scientists found evidence in northern Spain of cannibalism by Neanderthals. Some 1,800 bone fragments were used for DNA analysis to support their hypothesis. According to The New York Times report,
Spanish scientists who analyzed the bones and DNA report the gruesome…