Svante Paabo
Academy of Achievement
A pioneer of molecular paleontology, Svante Paabo 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 Paabo, 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. Paabo'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. Paabo extracted DNA