Epilogue

ANCIENT DNA AS CELEBRITY SCIENCE

BLAST FROM THE PAST

In the spring of 2020, Mary Schweitzer, a pioneer scientist in molecular paleontology at North Carolina State University, along with Alida Bailleul, a postdoctoral researcher of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Science, and colleagues published evidence for the exceptional preservation of cellular and molecular material in 75-million-year-old dinosaur bones. The evidence came from not one but two juvenile dinosaurs (Hypacrosaurus stebingeri), a species of herbivorous duck-billed dinosaur discovered in the badlands of Montana. Specifically, the team had recovered evidence of cells and even structures that resembled chromosomes and DNA retained from calcified dinosaur cartilage. Their findings were based on a series of immunological and histochemical tests conducted at the Museum of the Rockies and replicated separately at North Carolina State University.1

The Global News in Canada reported on the findings: “Bingo? Possible Dinosaur ‘DNA’ Found in 75-Million-Year-Old Fossil.”² The headline was a clear play on words from Mr. DNA, the cartoon character who narrated the step-by-step process of recreating dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park movie. National Geographic also covered the story, detailing the nuances of the research results and their implications for bringing dinosaurs back to life. “ ‘We’re not doing the Jurassic Park thing,’ ” Bailleul reported to the magazine. Schweitzer, all too aware of the cultural connection between the science of ancient DNA research and its science-fiction counterpart (as well as the contentious history between the two), underscored this point: “I’m not even willing to call it DNA because I’m cautious, and I don’t want to overstate the results,” Schweitzer explained. “There is something in these cells that is chemically consistent with and responds like DNA.”3 Indeed, Schweitzer, Bailleul, and colleagues were careful with their claim because the consensus among scientists was that although DNA could in fact survive the test of time, it was unlikely to persist for more than a million years and even more unlikely to be preserved intact from the days of the dinosaurs. In fact, the upper limit for DNA preservation was just shy of the million-year-mark.

Less than a decade earlier, researchers had extracted DNA from a 700,000-year-old permafrost-preserved horse bone in Alaska and successfully sequenced its genome, making it the oldest genome to date at that time. Ludovic Orlando—a leading practitioner in the field of ancient DNA research at the Center for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark—led the effort. Nature published their findings. Their work was most impressive for its technological and conceptual developments, as well as the conclusions about evolutionary history that could be drawn from the data they generated. They were able to demonstrate that DNA could survive intact for nearly a million years and they were able to reconstruct the genome of this ancient creature and further research its evolutionary history. To do so, they compared the ancient horse genome to modern genetic data from an approximately forty-thousand-year-old horse, five different breeds of extant horses, and one of the few Przewalski’s horses living today—a species once native to Mongolia in Central Asia and thought to be one of the last lines of wild horses. By comparing DNA sequences, they were able to determine that the 700,000-year-old horse was a common ancestor to all living horses today, both wild and domestic. They also determined that the Equus lineage—the lineage that includes extant horses, zebras, and donkeys—actually arose 4–4.5 million years ago.⁴

In reporting on this research, the press specifically highlighted the incredibly old age of the fossil and the genome successfully obtained from it. “700,000-Year-Old Horse Genome Shatters Record for Sequencing of Ancient DNA,” announced Wired.⁵ They also speculated about the implications of reaching farther back into the prehistoric past. The Guardian of London heralded the feat with the headline “Prehistoric DNA Sequencing: Jurassic Park Was Not So Wide of the Mark.” The article commented: “It is an extraordinary achievement, one that immediately raises the prospect that scientists might soon create the genomes of creatures that died more than a million years ago, possibly several million years. By that reckoning, Crichton and Spielberg would not seem to be so far out.”6 Although journalists highlighted the genome’s ancient age as the major breakthrough, scientists argued that the age was not the purpose of the study. Rather, it was the analysis of the genome data that mattered the most. “I don’t think we were really pushy in terms of the record. Of course, Nature made all the titles about it,” recalled one researcher involved in the effort. “In the media interviews we played the card, of course, because it’s just an easy thing to do.” Nonetheless, “the age is not the goal,” explained this interviewee. “It was not the principal motivation” (Interviewee 8). Although the age of the genome was a secondary achievement in comparison to the analysis of it, at least according to practitioners, it was nearly impossible for news sources to downplay it.

The record for the oldest genome was especially exciting because throughout the history of the discipline, much interest in the hunt for DNA from fossils had been propelled by the desire to discover the temporal boundaries of molecular preservation in some of the world’s most iconic specimens. In fact, the recovery of over 12 billion base pairs of DNA from a nearly 1-million-year-old horse offered an opportunity to reflect on how far the field of ancient DNA research has come since its birth in the early 1980s when researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, claimed to have sequenced a mere 229 base pairs of DNA from a 140-year-old quagga, an extinct member of the horse family. Nature published the latter results as the first evidence that DNA could be preserved and recovered from long-dead specimens. Now thirty years later, researchers were clearly pushing the temporality of DNA preservation to an extreme. However, in the field of ancient DNA research, as evidenced through this history of it, records are made to be broken.

In February 2021, for example, Scientific American reported the latest and greatest news from the world of ancient DNA research with the following headline: “Mammoth Genomes Shatter Record for Oldest DNA Sequences.”⁷ The research—conducted by Tom van der Valk and Love Dalén (the Center for Paleogenetics at Stockholm University in Sweden) and colleagues—was published in Nature. In this study, researchers extracted DNA from three mammoth teeth found in northeastern Siberia, each from a different time period ranging from the Early to Middle Pleistocene. From these permafrost-preserved specimens, scientists were able to sequence not just one but two ancient genomes from two of the teeth respectively, along with nearly 60 million base pairs of DNA from the third. The DNA recovered from these samples was estimated to be over 1 million years old and offered surprising findings about the evolution and interbreeding of several mammoth species, including the identification of a formerly unknown lineage.8 A report from ABC Science News states, “It’s not quite Jurassic Park, but scientists have successfully extracted and reconstructed million-year-old DNA from mammoth teeth—and solved a couple of mysteries about the creatures’ evolutionary history along the way.”⁹

From the 1980s to today, technology has been a crucial component in scientists’ ability to successfully obtain DNA from increasingly ancient organisms, and with drastic developments from PCR to NGS, much has changed for the field. However, in some ways, some things remain the same. Throughout its growth, the search for DNA from fossils has evolved under the influence of the press and public gaze, particularly as it coincided with and was pulled into the media spotlight by the book and movie Jurassic Park in the 1990s. Bailleul and Schweitzer’s recent research on the possible preservation of cellular and molecular material from multimillion-year-old dinosaur bones and its unsurprising framing with the Jurassic Park narrative is an example of this. Indeed, the media’s reporting of the oldest genomes to date, be it from ancient horses or extinct mammoths, with reference to Jurassic Park as the benchmark for progress, is further evidence of this enduring connection between science and science fiction.

CELEBRITY SCIENCE: A CONCEPT

Ancient DNA research has historically walked a fine line between science and science fiction. Today, the Jurassic Park franchise—as well as the prospect of resurrecting extinct species—continues to be closely connected to the science that inspired it. At the same time, this book has argued that the science of ancient DNA research was in turn influenced by it. Throughout these chapters, I have showed how a newfound scientific practice grew under the influence of consistent and intense press and public interest. More than that, I examined how ancient DNA researchers adapted to the media spotlight, engaging then disengaging with the attention, cultivating then controlling it in response to new innovations and challenges they encountered. Over the decades, the search for DNA from fossils has developed into a celebrity science.

Celebrity science is a new theoretical concept and analytical framework that has surfaced from my synthesis of professional and popular publications on ancient DNA research and from my analysis of interviews with scientists. From this, I suggest that a celebrity science is a subject of science that exists and evolves under intense public interest and extreme media exposure. The media are essential in the making of a celebrity science in that they consistently seek the science and its practitioners for their news value and appeal to the broader public. They repeatedly craft opportunities for publicity. However, it is just as essential that scientists participate in the process too. In such a science, media presence as well as influence is so substantial that researchers respond, positively and negatively, to the attention. They pragmatically anticipate then create their own occasions for fame or they develop strategies for distancing their work from it. They invent and reinvent their reputations and the reputation of their science according to popular influence. These science-media interactions are more than episodic. A celebrity science is the outcome of prolonged publicity: it is the process and product of consistent science-media interactions around a subject of science over an extended period of time. This results in a relationship between researchers and the media that is driven by the public interest they both seek to obtain then maintain.

Crucially, the term “celebrity science” does not seek to examine or explain celebrity on the individual level by pointing to the interactions that a single scientist has with the media. Instead, the intent is to explore how celebrity works on the group level. This involves an investigation of the celebrity that exists around a subject of science—the content of the research itself, as well as its conclusions and implications—with attention to how it affects the overall community of researchers working within it. In a celebrity science, it is the subject of science that is marketed as a commodity.

Although the term “celebrity science” applies specifically to the group level, I chose it as an extension of a different but not unrelated term—“celebrity scientist”—that does indeed refer to the phenomenon of celebrity at the individual level. This latter term was initially introduced by communication studies scholar Declan Fahy to explain the rising renown and influence of a handful of scientists today. Although the term is relatively recent and specific to the modern movement of celebrity culture in the mid- to late twentieth century, it feels familiar because scientists have in fact had a public presence in the past.10 Thomas Edison, for example, was the late nineteenth-century image of an iconic inventor, while Albert Einstein was the personification of early twentieth-century physics.¹¹ Fred Hoyle was the voice of astronomy on the radio, while Carl Sagan was the face of cosmology thanks to television and the on-screen stardom it fostered.¹² Isaac Newton as a popularizer of mathematics is another example of this pattern as early as the seventeenth century.¹³

The rise of mass media in the mid- to late twentieth century and journalists’ increased interest in science reporting, however, have offered researchers opportunities to become public-facing practitioners on a new level.¹⁴ In the 1970s, the science communication scholar Rae Goodell highlighted the effects of this, profiling a range of researchers from the anthropologist Margaret Mead and the biologist Paul Ehrlich to the chemist Linus Pauling. According to Goodell, these were all “visible scientists.” These visible scientists shared personal and professional characteristics—media-oriented characteristics—that helped them attain press and public visibility. As she aptly argued, visible scientists use their authority and access to the media as a platform from which to speak to the public not just about science but also about science policy.¹⁵ Fahy’s celebrity scientist concept builds on this.

For Fahy, the celebrity scientist is a new breed of scientist that has grown out of opportunities afforded by the rise of mass media but more importantly in light of a new celebrity culture. Fahy argues that from the 1980s onward, media started treating scientists as celebrities, and scientists in turn started acting as such. Much of this became apparent at the turn of the century. The Independent of London, for example, noted that the science of the early 2000s was full of “media superstars.” The New York Times called Neil deGrasse Tyson a “space-savvy celebrity,” while Nature called Susan Greenfield a “celebrity neuroscientist” and Science called her a “rock star.” As Fahy suggests, there is a qualitative difference between the visible scientists of the past and the celebrity scientists of today, and Carl Sagan embodied that difference.¹⁶ Fahy, in an article written with Bruce Lewenstein, argues that in the 1960s and 1970s, Sagan was what Goodell called a visible scientist. According to these authors, his visibility turned to celebrity after his big television break with his personal but professional show Cosmos: “Sagan marked the shift from visible scientist to celebrity scientist; he was a celebrity within a general culture that increasingly valued celebrity for its own sake.” This rise of celebrity culture, the increasing value of celebrity for its own sake, was a new social phenomenon introducing a view of “scientific stardom.” Fahy profiled a series of scientists who qualified as celebrity scientists, such as cosmologist Stephen Hawking and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. They were credentialed experts in their professional spheres but also attained fame, fortune, and influence in the public sphere. As celebrity scientists, they used the media as a public platform to popularize science and influence public attitudes toward it.17 For Fahy, however, stardom’s influence cuts both ways. As celebrity scientists, their stardom affords them influence within science.¹⁸ In other words, stardom filters back into science, affecting the process of science.

According to Fahy and other media studies experts, celebrity and celebrity culture, although observable phenomena in society today, are difficult to define.¹⁹ Indeed, what celebrity is and how it comes to be is far from straightforward. Graeme Turner offers a description of celebrity that does a nice job of capturing its complexity. According to him, celebrity is best understood as both a process and a product: it is both “a genre of representation” and “a commodity traded by the promotions, publicity and media industries that produce these representations and their effects.”²⁰ Celebrity is more than intermittent publicity. The making of celebrity is both a process and a product of repeated science-media interactions.

While celebrity has its positive attributes, such as fame or fortune, it also carries negative connotations. Historically, celebrity has been associated with inauthenticity. The historian Daniel Boorstin, for example, offered a definition that continues to be one of the most well-known adages regarding celebrity today. “The celebrity,” according to Boorstin, is “someone who is well-known for their well-knownness.”²¹ As he further explained, the celebrity is not necessarily known for their achievements but for their ability to publicly differentiate themselves from others via their personality. Boorstin argued that this differentiation is trivial, and he attributes the rise of the celebrity as a consequence of the inauthenticity of contemporary American culture in particular. Celebrity, in this view, represents a struggle between the authentic and inauthentic, and at least in this sense it is a pejorative term. However, as this history of ancient DNA research has revealed, celebrity is a more complex concept than the adage of being well-known for being well-known allows.

Sociologist Chris Rojek, for example, considers celebrity “the attribution of glamorous or notorious status to an individual within the public sphere.” For him, glamor and notoriety capture both the favorable and unfavorable forms of public recognition, which are often, and sometimes simultaneously, connected with celebrity. As Rojek argues, celebrity, whatever its attributions and effect, is carefully constructed by the mass media, and it can come in different forms too. Celebrity can be “ascribed” or “achieved,” meaning fame can come from lineage (Prince William and Prince Harry, for instance) or from accomplishments (Venus Williams and Serena Williams). However, celebrity can also be “attributed.” This happens when media sources repeatedly represent an individual or idea as exceptionally noteworthy.22 In whatever way stardom manifests itself, the media is a crucial component in the making of celebrity.

In the history of ancient DNA research, celebrity was bestowed on the discipline in more than one way. Celebrity was ascribed through the broader public’s inherent interest in fossils and the potential to recover DNA to tell us about ancient history and deep time. At the same time, celebrity was achieved through the accomplishments of scientists in the field sequencing the first or the oldest DNA from some of the world’s most charismatic creatures. Celebrity was also attributed by the media, evident from their frequent reporting on the topic over a prolonged period of time.

As the search for DNA from fossils developed into a discipline from the 1980s to today, the researchers involved in it responded to the field’s technological challenges and increasing identity as a celebrity science. Practitioners found they had to work around and against two different but not unrelated problems affecting the credibility of the search for DNA from fossils: the problem of contamination as it related to ancient DNA authenticity and the problem of what they viewed to be too much unjustified publicity as a result of the field’s celebrity. Scientists were concerned about “contamination” in both a literal and figurative sense.

By the end of the 1990s, contamination concerns as they related to ancient DNA authenticity had placed the practice’s credibility on the line. Here, the issue of contamination was illustrated most obviously and most publicly through a number of research papers claiming to have extracted and sequenced multimillion-year-old DNA from various specimens including amber fossils and bone from the days of the dinosaurs. Not long after these papers were published, other practitioners challenged the authenticity of their findings. In fact, some practitioners demonstrated that such bold claims were either irreproducible or the outright product of contamination. The overturning of these research results had devastating consequences for the community’s reputation, so much so that researchers within it had to work to reestablish their legitimacy in light of such failed expectations. The ancient DNA community was not just responding to failed expectations, but to the very public nature of those failed expectations because these very studies had been published in high-impact journals like Nature and Science and broadcast across the mass media. Consequently, scientists were also worried about the influence of celebrity as some saw the hype around the search for DNA from fossils as a further and more figurative source of contamination that had a profound impact on the perceived credibility of the scientific practice.

Interestingly, contamination concerns, despite the division they caused in the community, were also a source of cohesion. In an emerging practice full of multidisciplinary interests and experiences, 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. At the turn of the century, it became a very public conflict. But regardless of what side of the schism one fell on, the quest for ancient DNA authenticity was a marked feature of ancient DNA research. Scientists’ efforts to “discipline” their discipline via criteria of authenticity ultimately defined the discipline.

Even as contamination was a main source of disciplinary cohesion, so was the celebrity that surrounded the field. In fact, it empowered it, and here the media served as a crucial component to the field’s growth in its initial formation and overall identity. Specifically, there were two ways celebrity influenced the discipline’s development. First, celebrity influenced the community’s formation. This was most evident through the example of Jurassic Park and the multimillion-dollar franchise that followed it. The book and movie provided momentum behind the emerging practice, helping to marshal interest in terms of financial and organizational initiatives. This intentional exchange between scientists and the media—specifically around the idea of discovering DNA from some of the world’s most ancient and charismatic creatures—influenced publication timing, grant funding, research agendas, and professional recruitment. 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.

Next, celebrity played a role in ancient DNA research’s identity as a new scientific field. The public recognition gave the field and the practitioners working within it a sense of legitimacy. “Ancient DNA”—with the help of the media—became a brand. 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. Indeed, this book shows how practitioners’ concerns about contamination, as related to both ancient DNA authenticity and the influence of celebrity, and the way scientists articulated those concerns privately as well as publicly, played a fundamental role in driving, even defining, ancient DNA research as a scientific and technological practice in its own right.

CELEBRITY SCIENCE: IN CONTEXT

The history of ancient DNA research offers the opportunity to trace the development of a discipline in a world of modern media and celebrity culture, and at a time when science communication expectations are shifting. By placing the practice in this context, we can begin to understand the how and why behind the making of a celebrity science. In the 1980s, when the field was forming, a number of practitioners in the United Kingdom initiated the Public Understanding of Science (PUS) movement, a systematic endeavor to increase public awareness and appreciation of science and technology.23 The idea was that improving scientific literacy would encourage public and political support of science and technology. The Royal Society hosted a meeting of practitioners to discuss the objectives of this initiative, which resulted in a report published in 1985 that played a profound part in mobilizing the movement across the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe, and elswhere.²⁴ As a result of the report, the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS) was created to train scientists to work with journalists and other media outlets, rewarding them for their efforts to engage the public. The report also stimulated the Economic and Social Research Council to fund a research program and journal dedicated to the systematic study of the public understanding of science through surveys and other methods.²⁵

In the United States, the American Association for the Advancement of Science took similar steps toward improving public understanding of science and technology with the goal of increasing science literacy, especially science education, across the country. Peter Broks argues that the science communication movement of the 1980s was an attempt to legitimize popularization, giving scientists a professional initiative and incentive to appeal to the public through the media. Broks also suggests that this movement to legitimize popularization was just as much a move to empower science at a time when public support of it (intellectually and financially) was in decline. This decreased support occurred as a consequence of the professionalization of science in the second half of the nineteenth century, with individuals’ and institutions’ attempts to set themselves apart from the public in order to establish their authority within society. Now, however, to legitimize the social standing of their research, scientists and their scientific institutions once again had to appeal to the public.26

Overall, the Public Understanding of Science movement required and rewarded scientists to act as public-facing ones. As science studies scholars Jane Gregory and Steve Miller explain, “In the recent past, many scientists looked at involvement in the popularization of science as something that might damage their career; now, they are being told by the great and the good of science that they have no less than a duty to communicate with the public about their work.”²⁷ However, their ability to communicate on a public platform has also been aided by other developments like the “commercialization” of the mass media and even more recent movements in “mediatization,” “medialization,” and “celebrification.”²⁸ As some communication scholars have defined it, mediatization simply refers to the increased presence and power of digital media devices in everyday life, whereas the term “medialization” specifically refers to the closer coupling of science and mass media.²⁹ The phenomenon of “celebrification,” on the other hand, references the process by which the mass media makes an individual into a celebrity.³⁰ These developments, taken together, suggest a setting in which to begin to understand the phenomenon of celebrity science as revealed through the history of ancient DNA research. They also suggest a setting from which to understand how the science communication movement, among other movements, are in turn affecting the process and practice of science.

Researchers working in or around the field of ancient DNA research, for example, recognize the importance of communicating with the public about their work. Specifically, they recognize that the topic of de-extinction is a surefire conversation starter with the media. “There’s always going to be some level of celebrity science around trying to recreate extinct species,” remarked one researcher (Interviewee 25). This interest in de-extinction and its link to the search for DNA from fossils was not necessarily a link in the daily practice of the science itself. Rather, ancient DNA researchers engage with de-extinction, or at least entertain press and public interest in it, because they understand the advantages of doing so when communicating to the press, and therefore public and political audiences. In reference to the topic of de-extinction, one leading practitioner explained: “There’s two ways you can approach that. As a scientist responding to those kinds of inquiries, it’s very easy to slam the reporters and say, ‘Look. This has absolutely no connection. I don’t know why you keep bringing this up.’ I don’t find that serves my benefit or the benefit of the general public ever.” This interviewee further explained that while it is “very easy to slam it,” it is “also very easy to jump on it.” According to this scientist, “The question is whether you can have a meaningful discussion in the interstitial spaces between those two extremes” (Interviewee 33). This balance to engage with popular interests while maintaining control over the scientific message communicated to the public is the ever present challenge that ancient DNA researchers encounter.

Many in the field have described their engagement with the media on the topic of de-extinction as a strategy, and one often taken out of necessity. According to these scientists, the whole system and one’s level of success in it are tightly coupled with media coverage. An interviewee described this as a “self-perpetuating system” in which high-profile publications lead to high-profile press, which leads to further funding and ongoing research (Interviewee 25). For one practitioner, marketing is key: “It’s strategic thinking or writing . . . about how to package science into big picture questions that will get high-profile publications and grant funding. . . . Your ability to sell has actually become more important than your ability to do the science, sadly, given the way that funding has actually gone” (Interviewee 32). As a result, this system has shaped the sort of scientist working in or in close proximity to a celebrity science such as ancient DNA research.

Although ancient DNA researchers have not been profiled specifically as celebrity scientists or visible scientists (although some arguably could be), most are media-savvy scientists in that they have adopted characteristics that make them and their research appealing to the broader public. “I think it’s a crowd that’s in the limelight,” explained one evolutionary biologist. “I think it’s a crowd that’s used to having to speak to people that are outside of a lot of what they do. And I think it’s a crowd that kind of likes the idea that it’s got a lot of media attention, and therefore, has a lot more practice at it.” The interviewee further explained, “I’m sure that there are amazing people studying Arabidopsis [a genus of plant] who are equally good communicators, but they don’t get the opportunities because who the fuck cares about Arabidopsis?!” (Interviewee 22). As such, the overall community of ancient DNA researchers are particularly good communicators. Interviewees also observed that the field has attracted and in fact created researchers who are skilled in identifying celebrity-driven research that would mutually benefit themselves, their institutions, and the press and public they serve. One paleogeneticist remarked, “It’s producing a weird type of scientist—I would say a business type of scientist—who kind of knows how to function in this environment.” For example, “The people publishing in Nature and Science, even if it’s low hanging fruit, they will be the one more likely to pick up a position at a university because, again, the university wants a researcher who produces media attention” (Interviewee 37). Such researchers often embody ambitious, charismatic, competitive, and media-oriented personalities. Consequently, ancient DNA researchers are not always or simply victims of the next fad. Far from it, they are often shrewd in their ability to adopt current research trends, or even to create them, and adapt when newer options are on the horizon. When the spotlight moves on, these scientists know how to move with it.

From this view, I argue that the emergence of a celebrity science, especially as evidenced through the history of ancient DNA research, has been a positive phenomenon. A celebrity-driven strategy—as clearly and consistently utilized by ancient DNA researchers themselves over the decades—was a valid epistemic approach that practitioners, as well as editors and funders, employed when making choices about research agendas, publication acceptance, and grant funding. A celebrity-driven strategy was productive in generating scientific knowledge that might not have been produced otherwise. Certainly not all research was guided by (or needed to be guided by) its potential to attract popular interest. In fact, ancient DNA researchers sought a celebrity-driven strategy not exclusively but in combination with other data-driven and question-driven approaches. They used a variety of methodologies, sometimes foregrounding celebrity over the questions under study, other times prioritizing the utility of technology over the questions being asked, or focusing on biological or historical questions and using ancient DNA techniques as a means to answering them. These researchers adopted multiple approaches simultaneously and iteratively, assessing the achievability of research results against the accessibility of technology, availability of fossil samples, and the prestige they could gain. To be clear, celebrity was not a solitary factor influencing the discipline’s development, but it was a significant one. It helped shape the research practice in terms of influencing the questions scientists asked, the funding they received, and the ways they framed their research when communicating to wider popular and political audiences.

Although I argue that celebrity science is a positive phenomenon, scientists did perceive negative effects related to conducting their research under the media’s scrutiny. The field was full of tension as scientists tried to balance the growing celebrity with its credibility, not just once but multiple times throughout its history. Interviewees’ disparaging remarks about the celebrity-driven nature of research, and particularly the influence of Jurassic Park, do not negate what some scientists saw as positive outcomes from visibility. Rather, it highlights the complexity of celebrity, namely the battle for credibility and the need to balance the two. While practitioners desired to legitimize their research via the mass media, they were also constantly concerned that publicity might compromise their credibility and by extension their authority.31 Like it or not, this was a reality that scientists had to face, and one they continue to encounter.

In considering the celebrity science concept, it is important to understand that the process of science and technology innovation has never been, and can never be, conceived and conducted outside of the society in which it exists. This history has made this point clear, and countless other scholars have argued and provided much more extensive evidence in support of this worldview. Given that science does not exist outside the influence of society, the emergence of celebrity science is evidence of scientists’ hyper-awareness and responsiveness to the very culture in which they and their work are embedded. Interviews with the practitioners themselves provide extremely compelling evidence of the ever closer link between science and media, which stands as a further testament both to the increasing presence and power of the science-media connection in society today and to scientists’ pragmatic decisions to adapt to it. These practitioners’ perspectives reveal the intensity of the science-media connection and their role in actively participating in it, distancing, or even removing themselves from it, depending on changing circumstances across professional and public landscapes.

The celebrity science concept as told through the disciplinary development of ancient DNA research offers much to the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. The majority of science studies scholarship, for example, has focused on the media’s relationship with science by examining a scientist or scientific controversy in the public spotlight in order to understand how the two interact.32 While the broader science-media connection is evident across contemporary scientific practices, as scholars have well argued, instances of such connections shown to be prominent in shaping the practice of science have been primarily individualistic or episodic. Alternatively, the celebrity science concept argues that the role of the media and practitioners’ exchanges with it can be much more expansive. In the search for DNA from fossils, media influence was not limited to a single time, place, event, issue, or individual. Rather, media influence in the field of ancient DNA research was sustained over time through a number of interchanges, to the point that the entirety of the discipline’s development from the 1980s onward was shaped, and continues to be shaped, by persistent science-media interactions. The celebrity that surrounded the search for DNA from fossils was central to its birth, growth, and life as a new scientific field. Given this history of ancient DNA research, celebrity is also likely to be a part of the field’s future, especially as the science-media connection continues to develop into a more powerful and pervasive phenomenon in the twenty-first century.