Svante Pääbo: the DNA hunter taking us back to our roots
Through his study of ancient DNA, the geneticist Svante Pääbo has identified the Neanderthal lurking in many of us – and turned paleontology on its head
Leipzig's Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology is a striking edifice. Set among the drab housing blocks of former East Germany, the building, erected in 2003 and made largely of glass, curves gently like a banana round the edge of a suburban crescent. There is a pond in its huge forecourt with turtles and ducks. Television screens in its ground-floor cafeteria relay live images of orangutans and chimps from Leipzig zoo. There is a grand piano in one corner and above it a climbing wall rises to the main atrium's ceiling several floors overhead. For good measure, there is a sauna on the roof.
It is not clear whether staff relax by climbing the institute's walls to the sound of a Liszt concerto before taking a rooftop sauna. If they do, they have Svante Pääbo to thank. "The climbing wall and sauna were my ideas," he says. "When they put together plans for the institute and asked me work here, I insisted they have these. I suppose they fit in with my Swedish identity."
Pääbo is the institute's head of evolutionary genetics and an idiosyncratic researcher, a man obsessed – he admits – with the avoidance of contamination and the need to keep his laboratories and researchers scrupulously clean. In doing so, Pääbo has transformed the study of human origins. Among his achievements, he has sequenced an entire Neanderthal genome, revealing a link between these extinct people and many modern humans. He has also uncovered the existence of a previously unknown human species, called the Denisovans, from DNA extracted from a finger bone found in a cave in Siberia.
"When I started this field 25 years ago I thought we might be able to extract DNA from bones of people born a few thousand years ago and learn something about the ancient Egyptians or about the people who brought agriculture into Europe," says Pääbo. "It was beyond my wildest dreams to think we could resurrect genomes that are hundreds of thousands of years old. To have done that, well, it's really cool."
It is also incredibly difficult. DNA, the stuff from which our genes are made, decays the moment an organism dies. The long coils break down into fragments and the longer the passage of time, the shorter the fragments become. Trying to put these tiny pieces together is a stunningly complex task that has been likened, by writer Elizabeth Kolbert, to trying "to reassemble a Manhattan telephone book from pages that have been put through a shredder, mixed with yesterday's trash, and left to rot in a landfill".
Yet Pääbo has succeeded in this remarkable task, a story he recalls with striking frankness in Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes, published by Basic Books later this month. Near the beginning, the 58-year-old geneticist says he was inspired to a life scientific by his biochemist father. It is only later that he reveals how odd was this paternal inspiration.
"I grew up as the secret extra-marital son of Sune Bergström, who won the 1982 Nobel prize for discovering prostaglandins," he says. Bergström's "official" family knew nothing of the existence of Pääbo and his mother, the Estonian chemist Karin Pääbo, with whom the Nobel laureate had had an affair. "He would only visit us on Saturdays," says Pääbo. "It was pretty weird with hindsight."
Bergstrom died in 2005. "It was only then my half-brother learned about me," says Pääbo. "Fortunately, he adjusted and we get on all right."
Pääbo studied medicine and later biochemistry at Uppsala University, where he began working with researchers who studied DNA to understand its relationship to disease. "They were interested in its role in living people but I wanted to know what it could tell us about ancient people. Were they closely related to people today, for example?"
Pääbo consulted textbooks but could find no references to DNA being extracted from dead tissue. No one had really thought about it. .. read more:
