Svante Paabo: Neanderthal Man

Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Svante Pääbo, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, for a discussion of his intellectual journey. Svante Pääbo highlights both the opportunities and obstacles that characterized his 30 year quest to uncover the genome of Neanderthal Man. In the course of his reflections, he elucidates the nature of scientific inquiry and highlights the possible long-term implications of using genetic research to understand the genome of human ancestors and thereby understand the uniqueness of humans. Svante Pääbo was the 2014 Foerster Lecturer at Berkeley.