He is the founder of the field of ancient DNA studies his father was a Nobel prize-winning biologist, Sune Bergström, and his mother, Karin Pääbo, an Estonian chemist. Pääbo is Swedish/Estonian, and is currently director of genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He was probably singled out for this by an early passion, not for Neanderthals as such, but for mummified humans of a later date: the ancient Egyptians. Pääbo's mission was to provide another of those "missing links" that have been so much a feature of the progress of evolutionary thought. But since it quickly became obvious that for every human gene there was an almost identical chimp gene (even mice are genetically more than 90% similar to us), the mystery of "what made us human" remained. In the 40 or so years since the genetic code for protein manufacture had been cracked, much had been already learned about many of the 24,000 or so human genes. This was a Rosetta Stone before the key had been found. But decoding was the job that hadn't been done: the raw hieroglyphics had been discovered but not yet interpreted. It was loudly trumpeted at the time of the announcement of the completion of the first human genome survey that we had "decoded the Book of Life".
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