Neanderthal Man by Svante Pbo Read Free Book Online Page B

and you can do nothing to expedite it—just wait for a phone call that seems to never come. But finally, a few weeks later, I got the call I had been waiting for. The news was good. The mummy was 2,400 years old; it dated from about the time of the Alexandrian conquest of Egypt. I drew a sigh of relief. First I went out and bought a big box of chocolates, which I delivered to Göran. Then I started to think about publishing my findings.
    During my time in East Germany, I had developed some understanding of the sensitivities of people living under socialism. In particular, I knew that the museum curator and other museum officials who hosted my visit would be very disappointed with just a perfunctory expression of gratitude at the end of my paper. I wanted to do the right thing, so after talking to Rosti and conferring with Stephan Grunert, a young and ambitious East German Egyptologist whom I had befriended in Berlin, I decided to publish my first paper on mummy DNA in an East German scientific journal. Struggling with my high school German, I wrote up my findings, including photographs of the mummy itself and of the tissue stained for DNA. In the meantime, I had also extracted DNA from the mummy. This time, the extracts contained DNA that I could demonstrate in a gel, and I included a picture of such an experiment in the paper. Most of the DNA was degraded, but a small fraction of it was several thousand nucleotides long, similar in length to the DNA one could extract from fresh blood samples.
    This, I wrote, seemed to indicate that some DNA molecules from ancient tissues might well be large enough to allow the study of individual genes. I speculated wildly about what might be possible if DNA from ancient Egyptian mummies could be systematically studied. The paper ended on a hopeful note: “Work over the next few years will show if these expectations will be fulfilled.” I sent the manuscript to Stephan in Berlin. He fixed up my German, and in 1984 the article appeared in Das Altertum, a journal published by the East German Academy of Sciences. {3} And nothing happened. Not a single person wrote to me about it, much less asked for a reprint. I was excited, but no one else seemed to be.
    Having realized that the world at large did not make a habit of reading East German publications, I had written up similar results from the fragment of the mummified head of a man and, in October of the same year, had sent them to a Western journal that seemed appropriate—the Journal of Archaeological Science. But here the frustration turned out to be the unbelievable slowness of the journal, even compared with the delay my manuscript had experienced in East Germany, where it needed to be fixed up linguistically by Stephan and then presumably scrutinized by the political censors. This was, I felt, a reflection of the glacial speed with which the disciplines concerned with ancient things were moving. The Journal of Archaeological Science finally published my paper at the end of 1985 {4} — by which time the results it described had been largely overtaken by events.
    The next step—now that I had some mummy DNA—was obvious. I needed to clone it in bacteria. So I treated it with enzymes that make the ends of the DNA amenable to being joined to other pieces of DNA, mixed it with a bacterial plasmid, and added an enzyme that joins DNA fragments together. If successful, this would create hybrid molecules in which pieces of DNA from the mummy were joined to the plasmid DNA. When these plasmids were introduced into bacteria, they would not only allow the hybrid molecules to replicate to high copy numbers in bacterial cells but would also make the bacteria resistant to an antibiotic I would add to my culture medium, so that the bacteria would survive only if they contained a functioning plasmid. When seeded on growth plates containing the antibiotic, colonies of bacteria would appear if the experiment was successful. Each such colony would