Neanderthal Man- In Search of Lost Genomes
Book title: Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes
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This book taught me basics of next generation sequencing and how the techniques evoled recently. Super educational!
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The author described his own journey towards sequencing the Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes; “A fantastic portrayal of how science really works, from the perspective of a driven, charismatic, and successful scientist.””
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Neanderthals have puzzled scientists for decades about Precisely how they were related to modern humans. From 1981, as a Swedish graduate student secretly obsessed with extracting DNA from Egyptian mummies. .. bought a piece of calf’s liver and put it in a lab oven at about 120 degrees for a few days to approximate mummification. He succeeded in finding scattered fragments of DNA. He went on to find DNA in a 2,400-year-old mummy and then from much older animals, like extinct cave bears and ground sloths. In 2010, he became world-famous when he and his colleagues unveiled the Neanderthal genome.
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“Following the style of two previous memoirs by pioneering geneticists — James D. Watson’s “The Double Helix” (1968) and J. Craig Venter’s “A Life Decoded” (2007). In “The Double Helix,” Watson described discovering the structure of DNA. In “A Life Decoded,” Venter told how he led a team that developed new ways to read DNA and eventually assembled a rough draft of the entire human genome.”