At their best, memoirs are sustained drilling expeditions, in which writers mine their experiences to gain a deeper understanding of themselves. Paabo now recounts his success in recovering a human genome that has been sitting in fossils for tens of thousands of years.Īll three books are stories of scientific triumphs, but they’re presented more like memoirs.

In “A Life Decoded,” Venter told how he led a team that developed new ways to read DNA and eventually assembled a rough draft of the entire human genome. In “The Double Helix,” Watson described discovering the structure of DNA. Watson’s “The Double Helix” (1968) and J. The book follows the style of two previous memoirs by pioneering geneticists - James D. In “Neanderthal Man” Paabo offers a fascinating account of the three decades of research that led from a secret hobby to a scientific milestone. Precisely how they were related to modern humans became the source of a debate that rolled on for decades. But Neanderthals had brains as big as ours they could make sophisticated tools and hunt large mammals. They were clearly ancient (their fossils span a range from about 200,000 to 30,000 years ago) and had distinctive anatomical differences from living humans, such as a thick brow ridge.

Neanderthals have puzzled scientists ever since their fossils first emerged in a German quarry in 1856. In 2010, he became world-famous when he and his colleagues unveiled the Neanderthal genome. Paabo went on to find DNA in a 2,400-year-old mummy and then from much older animals, like extinct cave bears and ground sloths. It was the start of what has turned out to be an extraordinary scientific career. In the dried, blackened lump of meat, he succeeded in finding scattered fragments of DNA. He bought a piece of calf’s liver and put it in a lab oven at about 120 degrees for a few days to approximate mummification. No one at the time had any idea if the desiccated flesh of pharaohs still contained any genetic material, so Paabo decided to run an experiment. Paabo was supposed to be studying viruses, but he had become secretly obsessed with a more exotic line of research: extracting DNA from Egyptian mummies. In the summer of 1981, a Swedish graduate student named Svante Paabo filled a laboratory at the University of Uppsala with the stench of rotting liver.

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