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, show more 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. show less

If all scientists wrote as well (and/or had editors as good as) Svante Pääbo, popular science written by scientists would easily compete with those written by journalists.

Don't get me wrong, I have loved many science books written by journalists: [b:1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus|39020|1491 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus|Charles C. Mann|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327865228s/39020.jpg|38742], [b:1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus show more Created|9862761|1493 Uncovering the New World Columbus Created|Charles C. Mann|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327900945s/9862761.jpg|14754158], and [b:Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors|110995|Before the Dawn Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors|Nicholas Wade|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348824723s/110995.jpg|2922823] just to name a few recent ones I've read. They are excellent books, well-written and researched.

When a professional in the field tells the story, be they a scientist, historian or whatever, you tend to get a different perspective: more on the inside, a bit better informed and in-depth.

Svante Pääbo does this wonderfully in Neanderthal Man. It is not only the story of the first sequencing of the Neanderthal genome, but the story of the person who lead the effort, written by that same person.

The science in it is top notch as befits a researcher at the top of the field, but what makes it hard to put down is the story. Pääbo shares the personal side of his journey to paleogenetics which is also the story of the birth and childhood of the field as well. From his youthful dreams of decoding ancient DNA to the first sequences and publishing, we see the ups and downs, the successes, frustrations, despairs, fears and ebulliences of all aspects of the scientific life: technical, cultural, competitive and social.

Science is amazing in what it has and can do for us, but we forget that it is a human endeavor and few scientists share this side of it with us (and, of course, the journalists rarely get a chance to see it). Svante Pääbo deserves high praise for wedding the stories of his amazing technical achievement with his intimate personal experience. show less

What a fascinating ride! From working on the genome itself, through the way research institutions work to the personality of Paabo himself.
The book is written very much in the same convention as The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save the World, which is about the competition between Venter and Collins to sequence the genome. Paabo's book has the same unabashed honesty about rivalry in the science world, but here it's not written by journalist about the show more scientist, it is written by the scientist himself. Loved it.
I would love all scientists to be like Paabo, actually. He seems really anal in his insistence on purity, repetition of results, checking everything trice, and he seems entirely trustworthy because of that.
Fascinating as well how much we can learn from a tiny fragment of bone of an individual human who had lived eons ago.
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What I most appreciate about this scientific memoir is Paabo's frank analysis of his personal motivations and how they have driven his career from being a graduate student seeking to study a topic that really didn't exist yet to becoming a scientific entrepreneur with a sharp interest in playing the game to best personal and institutional advantage.