He then became the head of the genetics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Paabo then turned his focus toward Neanderthals when he was recruited by Germany's Munich University in 1995.Ī year later, he managed to sequence some mitochondrial DNA from a 40,000-year-old piece of Neanderthal bone. He first made international news in 1985, when he published research that found a DNA fragment in the mummy of a 2,400-year-old child. It proved a difficult task, because there are only trace amounts of DNA left in ancients remains. Surely they must have already occurred to someone else.'įinding that they had not, Paabo sought his own answers.

'Could it be possible to study ancient DNA sequences and thereby clarify how ancient Egyptians were related to one another and to people today?' he asked in his book. The crossover of his medical research using DNA and preoccupation with mummies put him on the path that would become his life's work.

Paabo also followed in his father's footsteps by studying biochemistry, earning a PhD at Uppsala University for using DNA research to study a protein of adenovirus, common viruses which cause cold-like symptoms.īut Paabo had long been fascinated with mummies and 'could not quite shake off my romantic fascination with ancient Egypt,' he wrote in his memoir. 'I had grown up as the secret extra-marital son of Sune Bergstrom,' Paabo wrote, adding that he had 'only occasionally' seen his father as an adult. Later he learned that his father 'had two families, one of which did not know about the other,' he wrote. In his 2014 memoir 'Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes', Paabo wrote that he gained inspiration to study medicine at Sweden's Uppsala University from his father, who had previously been a medical doctor.

He was born in Stockholm in 1955 to Estonian chemist Karin Paabo and Sune Bergstrom, a biochemist who won the Nobel Medicine Prize in 1982. Paabo, 67, was awarded the medicine Nobel for a long list of achievements including sequencing the Neanderthal genome for the first time and discovering the existence of a distant human relative called the Denisovans. However Paabo later learned that his father had been living a 'double life', and his existence had been kept a secret from his father's other family.

Paabo book