Svante Pääbo: Nobel Prize Conversations
Nobel Prize Conversations
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The Origins of Homonyms
Sante Perbu received his Nobel Prize for discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct homonyms and human evolution. He was looking to amplify and then sequence DNA from a mummy. But as we know from all those TV series about forensics, the world is littered with DNA from all sorts of different sources. So it could have been his own DNA on there as well, or the DNA of anything else that had touched the mummy over the years. And he probably just ended up mistakenly sequencing a bit of stray DNA from elsewhere.
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