Like Pääbo’s initial effort, other early searches for ancient DNA did not consider the possibility even the likelihood that contamination from handling, packaging, or the lab environment would overwhelm any genuine ancient DNA and produce a seemingly positive but misleading result. At first, he thought that he was successful ( 2), but he later realized that what he observed could have been recent contaminant, not authentic ancient, DNA ( 3). In a frank and engaging autobiographical memoir ( 1), he describes his graduate-student attempts to detect DNA in Egyptian mummies. As a graduate student in medicine and molecular biology at the University of Uppsala, he was intrigued by the idea that ancient tissues might preserve DNA. Pääbo was born in 1955 and educated through the PhD in Sweden. Svante Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist who directs the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for pioneering the extraction and analysis of DNA from ancient bones, above all those of the Neanderthals.
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