Celebrity as Identity
DISCIPLINARY COHESION
After a thirty-year history in the media spotlight, and for the first time since the community schism over contamination in the early 2000s, three scientists—Erika Hagelberg, Michael Hofreiter, and Christine Keyser (a geneticist at the University of Strasbourg)—organized a landmark conference, “Ancient DNA: The First Three Decades” in November 2013. Much had changed since the 1980s, and this was a chance to reflect on past and present research. Hosted at the Royal Society in London, the conference consisted of nearly thirty talks over four days, the first half of which were open to the press and public and the second half that were privately presented at the Royal Society’s Chicheley Hall. The meeting also resulted in a theme issue in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, featuring eighteen publications on the search for DNA from fossils.1
The meeting was more than a celebratory act. The commemoration also functioned as a way for scientists to reflect on and reinforce ancient DNA’s place within evolutionary biology.2 In the introduction to the special issue, Hagelberg, Hofreiter, and Keyser argued that the field was no longer a curiosity but now a credible practice: “In the past, a large number of ancient DNA studies were either purely technical, or one-off historical puzzles but, as we can see from the contributions to this Theme Issue, this is no longer the case, and ancient DNA researchers are now addressing a growing number of important scientific questions.”3 Leading up to this conference, a number of other papers suggested something similar. In an earlier article, for example, by Hofreiter and Michael Knapp, they claimed the search for DNA from fossils—once a “marginal discipline”—was on “its way into the centre of evolutionary biology.”4 The media echoed this sentiment too.5 The ancient DNA community had come a long way, turning ideas of science fiction into a scientific reality. Overall, the conference highlighted this achievement as well as the struggles scientists had to overcome in the process.
Indeed, the search for DNA from fossils and its development into a discipline in its own right was not inevitable. Practitioners had to work at it as it required a merging of various disciplinary values, not without difficulty of course, to answer questions about the investigation of DNA from fossils and its applications to a range of biological and historical questions. Researchers from paleontology and archeology to molecular biology, microbiology, biochemistry, and genetics brought different skills and scientific and epistemic cultures to the table. Consequently, they were faced with the task of building the field from the ground up with consideration for, and conflict among, the various disciplinary expertise it attracted but also required.
The issue of contamination, despite the conflict it brought to the community, was paradoxically vital to its disciplinary cohesion, helping to define it as a distinct practice recognizable to other scientists as well as the public. In other words, contamination was a shared struggle across the community, a common problem requiring a common solution.6 “There was definitely an ancient DNA community,” said one interviewee. It was a community of “people with the same sorts of struggles who were applying it to a number of different questions” (Interviewee 30). Another researcher offered a similar perspective: “We were working in completely different areas and almost had no common ground of communication other than how difficult it was to get ancient DNA out of the sample and then whether PCR worked or not” (Interviewee 32). In fact, historian of science Elsbeth Bösl argues that the question of ancient DNA authenticity and the community’s corresponding contamination concerns were an organizing principle that bound very different people together around a set of technical practices.7 Contamination was, and to some extent still is, a common theme connecting scientists in the field.
While contamination was a main source of disciplinary cohesion, so was the celebrity that surrounded the field. Specifically, there were two ways celebrity influenced the field’s growth over the decades. First, celebrity influenced the community’s initial formation. Jurassic Park and the multimillion-dollar franchise that followed provided momentum behind the emerging practice, helping to marshal interest in terms of financial and organizational initiatives. Persistent publicity on behalf of media reporters—further nurtured by scientists, journal editors, and funding agencies—gave direction to ancient DNA research in its earliest, most vulnerable phase of development. “I think media has played a huge role in ancient DNA,” said one scientist. “I think that it was intentionally used to play a big role in ancient DNA because, if you think about it, ancient DNA started as this field that was crazy!” As this scientist explained, “At the time, we didn’t have the methods. We didn’t have the know-how. . . . We needed that tie to build up to it and I think media was used to help generate interest and to maintain funding until we got to that point” (Interviewee 27).
This strategic and pragmatic use of media attention, especially in the early phases of research, is observable among other episodes in the history of science. Sociologist Elisabeth S. Clemmens, for example, detailed how scientists in the 1980s took advantage of the publicity surrounding controversy about what killed the dinosaurs as an opportunity for furthering discussion as well as research into the viability of competing hypotheses. The debate went public thanks to the asteroid impact hypothesis, and once it did, the media became a platform through which scientists communicated to one another across disciplines.8 Clemmens argued that popular interest in this topic catalyzed communication among different disciplines, leading to increased research initiatives: “For astrophysicists, geologists, and geochemists, however, the link with a compelling question such as the death of the dinosaurs brought the promise of a new source of publicity, celebrity, and, perhaps, even greater funding.” She also suggested that media attention helped scientists cross traditionally impermeable disciplinary boundaries: “Our usual image of the sciences is of a congeries of institutionally separate disciplines, each governed by a particular set of practices, professional norms, and cognitive orientations. But, as the impact debates graphically demonstrate, popular culture can serve as a matrix which fosters connections among disciplines that otherwise protect their institutional and intellectual autonomy.”9 As Clemmens made clear, a new scientific program can be initiated, then sustained, by popular interest.
Attention from outside the boundaries of what scientists see as standard science, such as the media, can in fact bridge disciplinary boundaries and sustain research development. For some interviewees, Jurassic Park was a critical component to the field’s growth, and it may have helped sustain interest in ancient DNA research, particularly at a time when its credibility was challenged. One geneticist speculated that the field may not have evolved to the extent that it did without Jurassic Park’s influence: “If there was no Jurassic Park, I don’t know how ancient DNA would be today,” remarked this researcher. “I’ve said before I’m surprised that it actually survived the time with the PCR, and I think if there was no Jurassic Park it might not have come to anything at all” (Interviewee 34). Indeed, celebrity mattered at every stage of the discipline’s development, even at a time when it was most contested, and at a time when celebrity was partly to blame (at least according to ancient DNA researchers). Even as researchers rejected the conclusions or implications of the Jurassic Park narrative, namely the long-term preservation of DNA and the ability to resurrect dinosaurs, they drew on the popularity of the novel and films to index the importance of the technical enterprise in which they were engaged.
Second, celebrity played a key role in ancient DNA research’s overall identity as a scientific discipline. Consistent press and public recognition helped define the search for DNA from fossils as a research practice in its own right. This was especially important given the absence of an overarching theoretical framework, as well as in the absence of, or difficulty in obtaining, reliable financial or institutional support for research. Celebrity gave the field and the scientists within it a sense of legitimacy. Ancient DNA became a brand. Under this label, the corresponding conferences, newsletters, publications, headlines, and grants put a name to what was at first a far-fetched idea, thus helping to turn it into something exciting and worthy of investigation. Meanwhile, the resulting media attention and globally successful Jurassic Park franchise made it a recognizable and desirable research practice to the broader public. “It is good to have a brand that people can recognize and to show that what you do is different from other fields,” explained a leading practitioner. “The term has certainly also been coined more by people who are trying to sell their science to the media as well” (Interviewee 12). To be clear, branding was far from superficial. It was purposeful and pragmatic. In a way, celebrity was a survival strategy for practitioners at a time when success was not necessarily a given. The preservation and extraction of DNA from ancient and extinct organisms had to be demonstrated. Obtaining press, public, and political support was important in doing so.
COMMUNITY CULTURE
Given the high risk of contamination, and high risk of failure because of the difficulty in demonstrating the authenticity and reproducibility of results, it seems surprising that so many individuals decided to enter the discipline. According to interviewees, however, the celebrity around the subject of ancient DNA research was a major reason for why some joined the search for DNA from fossils in the first place. Although there was a big risk of failure, there was also an equally big or even bigger reward should success be achieved. Not only did the media spotlight play a role in recruiting researchers into the practice but it also attracted the type of individual keen to take on its technical challenges and publicity potential. “I think . . . part of the reason it was fun was because you had to be slightly crazy in the 1990s to start getting into this field,” said one biomolecular archeologist. “[My colleague] and I were slightly crazy, but we did it. Everybody was slightly crazy” (Interviewee 4). A second practitioner echoed this sentiment: “In the early days of the field, it was ripe for failure. Who’s going to try and go out and get DNA from a dinosaur?” According to this interviewee, “If you wanted to set up a successful research career, and you wanted something safe, ancient DNA was not your thing. In the mid- to late 90s? No way!” (Interviewee 22). Indeed, there was a shared sense of risk in exploring such new territory that attracted a “quirky type of scientist” (Interviewee 4). It attracted a scientist with a “cowboy mentality”—those who were the “exact opposite of risk averse” (Interviewee 22).
The high-risk, high-reward nature of the search for DNA from fossils also produced a competitive community. “Everyone else was running towards the prize,” said an early practitioner in the field. “One of the things that has annoyed me about ancient DNA . . . was that people were just running around to get the next sequence” (Interviewee 9). This race for the first and oldest DNA from some of the world’s most charismatic creatures was not entirely unexpected. In fact, the race to be first in science is the result of what philosopher of science Michael Strevens calls the “priority rule.” As he explains, the system in which scientific research operates recognizes and rewards those individuals—through publications, promotions, publicity, and funding—who come in first with a new theory, technology, or discovery.10 In the field of ancient DNA research, the priority rule was all consuming. “You can sequence an extinct species for the first time only once,” explained an interviewee. “So, the second headline is always smaller than the first one” (Interviewee 14). Consequently, competition was fierce in this field.
Within the community, researchers had their own hypotheses to explain the nature of the hunt for DNA from fossils. One evolutionary biologist said, “In ancient DNA it is relatively easy—getting a lot of attention—because it’s a topic that naturally lends itself to media attention somehow. And I think that’s one part that makes it so competitive and competition does not always bring the best out of people.” On top of that, “many people are also very interested in media attention, so if it’s important to be the first to get media attention, people do a lot of being ‘the first.’ ” This scientist explained it further: “[A colleague] once mentioned it also has to do with the fact that you don’t have to be particularly intelligent to be successful in ancient DNA—you have to be scrupulous to get the samples and to be faster than somebody else and to convince people to give you enough money.” For example, “it’s not like theoretical population genetics when you have to be a really good mathematician to make major contributions. So, it does not necessarily attract the most intelligent researchers, but it definitely attracts very competitive ones who are also more interested in presenting themselves to the media.” According to this scientist, “that’s also one thing in theoretical population genetics—you might get high citation rates, but no newspaper will write about it. Whereas if you can present the first mammoth genome, every newspaper will write about it” (Interviewee 15).
As interviewees noted, media attention was a cause and a consequence of competition among ancient DNA practitioners, so much so that it shaped their community culture. Competition for media attention often revolved around gaining access to fossils, especially the high-profile ones (dinosaurs, mammoths, or ancient humans). “A colleague of mine said it was almost like Gollum out of Lord of the Rings,” explained a geneticist. “You have this precious. And maybe that’s a throw over from anthropology but certainly power resided with those who could persuade people with bones” (Interviewee 21). The necessity but at the same time the rarity of fossils engendered much of this conflict. Another researcher added, “I know a couple of people who’ve said they’ve never come across anything quite as vicious and nasty as the ancient DNA field.” When asked why competition was so fierce, this same scientist said, “Oh, because it’s a small niche area. There’s only so many really big questions you can answer or tackle. At least in the ancient DNA world, there are a lot of alpha-males kicking around who all want to basically not only own their territory but own the whole territory” (Interviewee 25). Disputes often occurred as researchers raced for access to specific samples that were especially newsworthy. “Actually, working in the ancient DNA field is often very difficult because there’s so much competition over samples because the samples are very high-value, very sexy-type items,” admitted one researcher (Interviewee 21).
Broadly, competition affected how different generations of researchers interacted with one another. One leading practitioner who entered the discipline at the height of the community competition in the late 1990s and early 2000s offered this opinion: “The generations before me—which I guess would be one to two generations of people before me—I always saw as being a very nasty community, extremely competitive, totally dominant. I think with my generation it has certainly improved.” The aggressiveness caused some scientists to leave the field, but those who stayed tried to change the culture: “I remember that my generation . . . had always talked about [how] we were really tired of . . . the aggressiveness in the field, and from that perspective, I think we have had a different attitude. . . . We’re still competing with each other and sometimes we’re collaborating with each other.” (Interviewee 7).
As the community expanded, the first generation of scientists from the early 1980s to early 1990s came into conflict with the second generation of researchers emerging at the turn of the century. “What’s happened is that the children have killed their parents,” one senior researcher explained. “There were these fairly average people getting into positions of power, but then their students were actually smarter than they were and so they kind of grew beyond their supervisors into an odd cycle of destruction” (Interviewee 9). For several students, their relationships with their supervisors were professionally or personally difficult. One practitioner who identified with the second generation said, “It’s strange that the whole second generation is traumatized, somehow, by their Ph.D. supervisor, or by someone. I mean, we’re not suffering anymore but we—all of us—had a period in our life where we suffered.” For this practitioner, “That’s what ties us together” (Interviewee 14). Another researcher of this generation made a similar statement: “If we think of that sort of generation then honestly I think the big change is that we are generally friends. . . . All those people—same generation—we get along pretty well together maybe because we all had pretty weird supervisors. [Laughs] So, yeah, that was a connection up front” (Interviewee 8).
In response to their strained relationships with first-generation supervisors, a number of second-generation scientists reacted by consciously creating a new atmosphere for themselves and their own future students: “There are two reactions from psychology,” explained an interviewee. “When you’re beaten, you beat back or you don’t beat at all. So, I try not to beat at all. I try to treat my people better than my Ph.D. supervisor treated me. So, I very consciously thought about the social structure and the relation between people in my group because of that” (Interviewee 14). Another scientist added, “It just taught me the value of relationships. The samples are hard to get, but you can get them. The money is hard to get, but you can get it. People, though, as soon as you blow up relationships you have cut off access to money and samples and grants like you don’t even know” (Interviewee 22). These practitioners’ reactions to and reflections on their predecessors are examples of what the historian of science Joe Cain terms “patricide.” “In the context of using history to construct heritage,” Cain argues, “patricide is a systematic attempt to disconnect—to construct not relevance but irrelevance.”11 These second-generation scientists’ efforts to break from past supervisor practices were systematic attempts to dissociate from the first generation, thus distinguishing themselves in order to create their own professional and personal identities within an already contested community.
IDENTITY CRISIS
In the introduction to the theme issue published in connection with the 2013 conference, the authors commented on what, for a lack of a better term, might be described as an identity crisis. Even in light of the practice’s recent theoretical or technological developments, which scientists and media reporters felt indicated the maturing of a discipline, some researchers questioned whether ancient DNA research was even a discipline at all. “Despite these advances,” wrote Hagelberg, Hofreiter, and Keyser, “ancient DNA research still has the feel of a young science. Some even doubt whether it is a field at all, or instead a collection of applications of molecular techniques to a variety of biological problems.”12 Interviews with researchers themselves reflected this dilemma too.
On one hand, some practitioners saw ancient DNA research as a field, a distinct discipline on its own. “I think it’s a field,” said one scientist. “You need lots of techniques in order to study it” but “it’s not a technique” (Interviewee 23). Others argued for its status as a field too but one that was dependent on technology: “It’s a field in itself, but it’s strongly dependent on the techniques. The techniques are always shaping the field, and constraining it or expanding it. So, we will always be dependent on that” (Interviewee 49). Along this same line, a postdoctoral researcher proposed that the time, energy, and knowledge necessary to develop the methods and techniques were what made ancient DNA research a field on its own: “Ancient DNA—people develop methods to extract DNA and to preserve DNA or make it more efficient, cheaper. That’s a field in itself and it has its own questions, but then you can use that branch to ask lots of questions” (Interviewee 51).
Conversely, a number of interviewees held that the search for DNA from fossils is more of a technique but also said that if it is a field, it is at least an unusual one: “I don’t think ancient DNA is a research field as such. I’m going to be a bit—what’s the word—provocative here. Or at least it’s a very odd kind of research field. It’s a technique.” This interviewee shared a story to explain this point: “I can think of an ancient DNA researcher, but this person is by no means unique. In fact, it’s quite common to people in that field. One minute they’re working on the vegetational history of Siberia and the next minute they’re working on what was the ethnicity of the first people to enter the New World, at the same time they’re working on the phylogeny of camels.” For this interviewee, this situation was distinctly different from other research agendas or approaches: “Now, you could not find that . . . in this institution. . . . There are people who devote their life to the phylogeny of algae. There are people who work on early mammal radiation. There are people who work on human evolution. This is because they’ve got some kind of drive because they’re asking questions.” But they quickly qualified this point: “I think the one thing that may be, might be said, in contradiction to what I’ve just said is that it is a specialist technique. You know, this . . . leading researcher who is working in all those areas is doing that because they have a great deal of expertise in extracting DNA out of different sources. That in itself is a skill” (Interviewee 3).
This disciplinary dilemma also extended to researchers’ identities. The multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of ancient DNA research, a practice that emerged from the interface of disciplines like paleontology, archeology, and genetics, problematized how scientists saw their professional identities. When asked about professional identity, one researcher replied, “This is a very good question and hard to answer. I give different answers depending on who asks me” (Interviewee 12). Other comments were comparable: “I’m a population geneticist or an evolutionary biologist or someone who tries to study human history with DNA or I don’t know. It depends on the audience I’m talking to how I describe myself differently” (Interviewee 48). “I describe myself as a molecular evolutionist or a molecular archeologist. It depends on who I’m talking to and which project I’m working on at the time” (Interviewee 32). “I’m a jack-of-all-trades and master of none because I’ve done so many different things” (Interviewee 25).
Bösl also recognized the controversial nature of ancient DNA research’s status as a new scientific field or technique used across other fields. As she notes, the status of DNA as source material for research questions, be they biological or historical, was heavily dependent on what question was being asked and who was doing the asking. For example, population geneticists work with both ancient and recent DNA and with both archeological specimens and living people today. Their data and the sources of the data span both space and time. In another instance, Bösl explains that in the study of bioarcheology, ancient DNA analyses are important but subordinate to other, more traditional sources of data and methods. Something similar can be said for the study of paleoanthropology and paleobotany in that ancient DNA analyses are valued as sources of data but are not a replacement for conventional morphological sources. In light of such diverse prioritization of ancient DNA data, Bösl acknowledges that the term “ancient DNA research” has been used by various researchers to loosely refer to a community of practitioners that emerged in the late 1980s, but that there are not hard and fast disciplinary boundaries that define or contain it.13
Ancient DNA’s identity crisis over its status as a field, technique, or mix of the two has much to do with the fact that its multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary nature does not often or easily map onto traditional institutional frameworks for employment or research funding. Indeed, there is no one research journal, professorship, or clearly defined career pathway for this type of research. This means most researchers working with ancient DNA data are employed in a traditional archeology department or a genetics department, and in some cases they found themselves as researchers in both. One interviewee, for example, who was trained in anthropology and genetics reported feeling “firmly planted in both fields.” At the same time, this interviewee—employed by two university departments (anthropology and genetics) to teach both social science and science undergraduates—admitted this overlap often left a sense of being spread too thin: “Sometimes it makes me feel like I’m not up in either” (Interviewee 30). This was more than a personal or professional problem. It was, and still is, a financial problem, especially for practitioners in the United States. Despite the fact that the search for DNA from fossils first attracted professional and popular attention in America, government grants for research have remained significantly lower than funding in Europe. A report in Science by Ann Gibbons notes, “While Europe forges ahead on a transformative technique, U.S. researchers struggle for funding.” As Gibbons explains, “The interdisciplinary nature of the method is part of its power but also makes it prone to fall through the cracks in the U.S. system.”14 This tendency to fall through the cracks has had interesting implications for how ancient DNA researchers see the alleged discipline in which they work. In Europe, there are institutions that are better equipped to embrace the search for ancient DNA, working across traditional research boundaries in an effort to bridge knowledge and method gaps. Researchers such as Svante Pääbo and Johannes Krause, for example, with their training in biochemistry and evolutionary anthropology, feel at home at the Max Planck Institutes in Leipzig and Jena, respectively, because these institutions allow them the flexibility and funding to merge the two worlds of archeology and genetics.15 But such a position is the exception, not the norm.
There were other reasons, suggested by scientists themselves, as to why their disciplinary status was under question. According to several interviewees, the innovation of NGS changed contamination concerns, making it less of an ever present issue and therefore making ancient DNA research less of a problem-centered science. “I think one of the biggest changes that’s happened with ancient DNA is that it’s really not even a field,” said a younger, leading practitioner. “So, in the beginning, ancient DNA had its own thing, its own methods, it was all specialized. . . . It was all its own separate world.” This changed as practitioners transitioned from the PCR and Sanger sequencing methodology to NGS: “And now it’s really just genomics—applied to ancient samples. We don’t have to adapt our data sets or adapt our methods or adapt our statistics anymore. We can just use the same statistics that everyone else is using in the entire field of genomics. . . . We can basically do anything that anyone else can do” (Interviewee 27). In other words, a formerly specialized technique was becoming more mainstream because contamination was less of a concern. “The voodoo is over,” explained a geneticist (Interviewee 21). Without this problem, which defined the discipline for most of its history, scientists began to question the future of the field. One early practitioner, for example, suggested that a community was no longer necessary. “I think it’s matured so much that there no longer is a community,” this interviewee said, laughing. “You’ve got all these people using this technique—technologies—to answer questions and it’s matured to the point where people from all these different areas don’t really need to talk to one another” (Interviewee 24).
As much as contamination and the problems it posed for ancient DNA authenticity were a serious source of conflict for the community, they also created a strong source of unity. In an unpublished paper, two practitioners, Bernd Herrmann and Charles Greenblatt, offered this opinion of the future of the field: “It might be sad, but our community faces the fate of all pioneering communities. To a certain extent in our opinion the task is done. What now comes is the routinization within the subjects, wherever a[ncient] DNA technology is suitable and helpful in solving the problems in associated fields. The a[ncient] DNA research has been described as an interdisciplinary science. Here an uncertain future awaits us.” As practitioners of an emerging practice with multidisciplinary interests and interactions, scientists were united through common problems concerning the preservation, extraction, and sequencing of DNA from fossils. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, contamination was a source of community cohesion as researchers discussed it in newsletters and debated it at conferences. But regardless of what side of the schism one was on, believers or non-believers, criteria of authenticity defined the discipline and colored researchers’ memories of their histories and contributed to the shaping of their identities. Indeed, some argued that the hunt for ancient DNA was a method-based science defined around contamination concerns. Herrmann and Greenblatt remarked, “There is no common epistemological roof for a[ncient] DNA research but only a methodological one. It appears to us that most of the scholars in the field are not really interested in methodological and epistemological developments but in getting their specific questions answered. But in trying to do so, they had to turn themselves into method developers first and thus met a couple of people who were working on the same limitations, drawbacks, and pitfalls as they did.” Further, “This is the true background for the a[ncient] DNA community, not a scientific program to solve a shared big question, and this may be one of our drawbacks.”16 Contamination was a core component of ancient DNA’s social structure, but as it became less of an issue, a number of ancient DNA researchers questioned what the future of the field would be without it.
SCIENCE IN TRANSITION
The search for DNA from fossils emerged from the interface of disparate disciplines with distinctive research traditions and epistemic standards, from paleontology and archeology to epidemiology and molecular biology. Consequently, ancient DNA researchers had to create their own scientific culture from the intersection of many. The philosopher of science Peter Galison’s notion of a “trading zone” is useful for understanding how practitioners from varied scientific backgrounds converged and went on to create a sort of unified community from what was a disunified beginning.17 Drawing on a study of engineers and physicists in their collective work on particle detectors and radar, Galison used the notion of a trading zone to explain how the two successfully collaborated with one another from their dissimilar scientific paradigms. In the history of ancient DNA research, this shared interest in old molecules brought researchers together. Here, the idea of extracting DNA from fossils and using it to study evolutionary history was a boundary object that researchers rallied around and communicated across. But interest alone was not enough to establish a coherent community. As Bösl argues, those in search of DNA from fossils worked tirelessly, and sometimes unsuccessfully, to cross disciplinary boundaries and merge their divergent scientific, epistemic, and cultural differences.18 This was especially true when scientists were faced with the extent to which certain sources of evidence, be it genetic, paleontological, archeological, or historical, could be combined and prioritized to make interpretations about the past, in particular about human history. In this trading zone, there was not always consensus but there was collaboration between, as well as competition among, researchers in the community that formed from it. In fact, there was a good deal of boundary-work going on as scientists tested and imposed limits through criteria of authenticity to try to standardize the research practice and their place as professionals within it.
Although criteria of authenticity, and the degree to which they are employed or enforced, were not a point of agreement, this was a shared concept and concern among ancient DNA researchers that affected the whole of the field. The search for DNA from fossils was an intensely technical and methodological challenge that required cooperation among scientists in order to overcome disciplinary boundaries and address the problem of contamination in regard to ancient DNA authenticity and reproducibility, both of which were seen as vital to the discipline’s credibility. Over the years, contamination was a shared problem, and as such it became a defining part of this new group of scientists.
Yet celebrity played a part in the formation of this field too. Specifically, there were two ways in which press and public interest had a hand in ancient DNA’s formation from the 1980s to today. First, popular interest helped to shape the practice of science by influencing the questions researchers asked, the funding they received, and the way they framed their research when communicating to wider popular and political audiences about its significance. Second, press and public recognition helped to define the search for DNA from fossils as a discipline in its own right. In the absence of an overarching theoretical framework and of consistent financial or institutional support, popular attention gave the field and the scientists within it a sort of status.
However, the introduction of NGS at the turn of the century changed the situation for the community. NGS offered an opportunity to overcome some of its most persistent technological challenges, namely the lack of data and problem of contamination. To be clear, NGS did not remove the possibility of contamination, but it did reframe the problem. Indeed, ancient samples had contaminating sequences, but practitioners were able to calculate the amount of contamination, permitting them to increase confidence in DNA authenticity. Without this pervasive problem of contamination, which defined the discipline for most of its history, interviewees questioned the future of the field.
In light of the field’s general move from PCR to NGS, many interviewees argued that ancient DNA research would become more of a reliable and routine technique used as a tool in other fields, much like carbon-dating in the field of archeology. As a consequence, one interviewee predicted that the discipline would slowly but eventually “evaporate” (Interviewee 3). Another put the point more bluntly, going so far as to suggest the death of the discipline: “The death of ancient DNA has come about because no longer can you have a career as being someone who is good at getting ancient DNA out of old fossils. Now you have to actually understand that data.” For this interviewee, the practice was becoming more mainstream as a means for answering biological, archeological, or historical questions: “The death is when you’ve got groups like David Reich’s group or Svante [Pääbo’s] group starting to just have ancient DNA as part of their group. Suddenly, it’s just part of population genetics. There is no longer a discipline.” As this interviewee further explained, “Ancient DNA was a discipline where you had to be specifically trained because levels of contamination were so high and the techniques were so poor that you needed specialist skills.” As contamination became less of an issue, researchers turned to the expertise of statisticians and bioinformaticians: “You need to be someone whose head is in population genetics, and those people can now sweep up the ancient DNA data and interrogate it with modern data and do meaningful things with it. Consequently, the field of ancient DNA is dead.” Crucially, this did not indicate its failure. Rather, some saw its death as its success: “It’s not a death because it’s done. It’s because [it has] taken over. It moves into mainstream” (Interviewee 9). Another added, “The end of the ancient DNA society, as such, was because of its own success” (Interviewee 28).
New opportunities, as well as new obstacles, presented themselves. According to scientists in search of ancient genomes, population genetics was the new name of the game. One influential practitioner put it this way: “I’ve been waiting for the field to die out for twelve years now. I always considered ancient DNA to be mature when we wouldn’t need an ancient DNA community anymore, but we would have the normal communities—ecology, evolution, archeology, whatever—and this would be applied as tools.” This researcher quickly qualified this, explaining there was a need for a community, just a different type of community: “Since we’re having a technical development, since we’re having next-generation sequencing, since we’re now working with analytical methods and software connected to next-generation sequencing, we’re still having specific, or at least semi-specific, development in ancient DNA which is still to some extent legalizing an ancient DNA community” (Interviewee 46). Expertise in mathematics, statistics, and bioinformatics was one way forward. As one geneticist said, “So, the future belongs to the geeks, not the Greeks, I suppose. [Laughs] It really does” (Interviewee 21). This new skill set would require researchers, particularly archeologists, to not necessarily become population geneticists in their own right but to understand what population geneticists are capable of, as well as their limitations, when reconstructing past population origins, migrations, and evolution.19 The transition from PCR to NGS was not just a transition from one technology to another. For researchers, it represented a fundamental restructuring of the practice within wider scientific discourse.