Svante Pääbo

For some reason, I was always a bit dubious about the claims that human shared DNA with Neanderthals, figuring that there was so little Neanderthal DNA that could be sussed out, and that some big conclusions were being drawn.

I was wrong. In this book, Svante Pääbo, who led the successful project in Leipzig, discusses his career working with ancient DNA, from early attempts to sequence DNA from Eqyptian mummies to just a couple years ago. He discusses, in detail, the problems they faced, and the solutions they found to them. By the time you finish this, there's no doubt he's correct.

This is a a great picture of how science is done, when its done right. He's always very conscious of trying to shoot holes in his own ideas and the results his team came up with. If you want to pick holes in what he found, go ahead, but you're not going to do a better job of it than he did.

It's also just fun reading: Paabo is a very good explainer of science and technology, and he's good at sketching the characters of his team members and his competitors. He's honest about his failings and times when he led the team down a wrong path, and he doesn't hesitate to give out credit to others.

In short, this is an excellent book, one of the best books about science as it's practiced that I've read; it's also a very appealing, honest, personal memoir. Very highly recommended.… (more)

Svante Pääbo's memoir that is mainly about the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome. I found the technical details that are present to be most interesting. The author's honesty also gives an interesting look into top tier competitive life science. Imagine being so prominent in your field that you can, on the one hand, run down the journals Nature and Science as being too eager to publish half-baked work, and, on the other hand, call the editors of Nature and Science to pre-announce and promote your upcoming work. Overall, it's well worth reading. I did find the details of the author's sexual proclivities to be especially uninteresting.… (more)