Svante Pääbo
Biographical Information
Svante Pääbo is Director, Department of Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. Svante Pääbo first gained public acclaim for his reference
work on the analysis of DNA from archeological samples. He was the first person
to show that modern DNA amplification techniques could be applied to ancient DNA,
thereby opening windows on our ancestral history and revealing the secrets of human
divergence from the apes. His undergraduate education at the University of Uppsala covered
subjects ranging from Egyptology and Russian to molecular virology and medical
studies. His doctoral studies, based on his successful isolation of DNA in samples taken
from Egyptian mummies in museums, were published in Nature. In the 20 years since
that ground-breaking work, he has published over 170 papers and used the techniques
he developed to carry out analyses of Neanderthal and Ape genomes. He has worked
in Zurich, London, California and Uppsala, and since 1997 directs the multidisciplinary
Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzeig. He is now regarded as the founding
father of paleogenetics, the application of genetics to paleontology. Svante Pääbo is
currently using the lense of comparative genomics, to obtain a wide-angle view of species divergence patterns.
Research in his laboratory has most recently focused on crossspecies
comparison of brain-specific gene expression patterns and on the evolution of
genes associated with the capacity for human speech. Svante Pääbo has a distinguished
record of service on scientific editorial boards and policy-making review committees, and
continues to uncover rich new seams of knowledge confluence at a prolific rate. He is
the recipient of many academic prizes and honors, including the Louis Jeantet Prize for
Medicine, 2005. |
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