A pioneer of molecular paleontology, Svante Pääbo has developed and refined the technique of isolating and sequencing the DNA of creatures long extinct. Year after year, he is making discoveries that shed light on our own evolutionary past, and on what it means to be human.

The Stockholm-born Pääbo, who had once considered becoming an Egyptologist, was a Ph.D. student in molecular genetics at the University of Uppsala, Sweden when he set out to capture a DNA sample from an ancient Egyptian mummy. Extracting coherent DNA from human remains is enormously difficult, as they have usually been contaminated with bacteria and other living matter. Pääbo’s former Egyptology professors provided him with tissue samples, but he feared his Ph.D. advisor would disapprove of such a far-fetched project. Working in secret, he succeeded in sequencing a quantity of DNA from the mummy of a 2,400-year-old Egyptian boy, a finding he published in Nature in 1985.

Over the next decade, Dr. Pääbo extracted DNA from the remains of mammoths and ground sloths, cave bears and marsupial wolves. He even sequenced a DNA sample from the so-called “Ice Man,” who had lain frozen in an Alpine glacier for 5,000 years. In 1996, he made headlines around the world when he succeeded in procuring a DNA sample from the 42,000-year-old remains of a Neanderthal man.

Today, Dr. Pääbo heads the genetics department at the Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Among his first accomplishments at the institute was mapping the entire genome sequence of the chimpanzee, enabling a gene-for-gene comparison with the human genome. Further study could reveal why chimpanzees are immune to such human diseases as AIDS and malaria, and may offer hope for the treatment of speech disorders and autism. Dr. Pääbo is now attempting to map the entire genome of the Neanderthal. If he succeeds, comparisons with the genome of modern humans will yield invaluable insight into our own origins, and Svante Pääbo, his admirers suspect, will be due for a Nobel Prize.