Neanderthal Man

by Pbo, Svante

  Neanderthals as the closest extinct relative of modern humans would of course fit well with this concept. So would the study of our closest living relatives, the great apes. And so it came to be that the renowned American psychologist Mike Tomasello, who works with both humans and apes, was invited to start a department in the institute, as was Christophe Boesch, a Swiss primatologist who with his wife Hedwige had spent many years living in the forest in the Ivory Coast to study wild chimpanzees. A comparative linguist, Bernard Comrie, who is British but worked in the United States for several years, was also invited to join the institute. I was very impressed not only by the quality of the people chosen but by the fact that they all came from outside Germany. I, who had lived in Germany for a mere seven years, was the most “German” of the people entrusted with starting this institute. In few European countries could one be so little impeded by chauvinistic prejudice that a huge research institute—which eventually would employ more than four hundred people—would be led entirely by people from outside the country.

  During one of the first meetings in Munich at which all prospective directors of departments were present, I suggested that the four of us get out of town to relax and be alone among ourselves. So in the evening we crammed into my small car and drove to Tegernsee in the Bavarian Alps. As the sun was setting we hiked up Hirschberg, a mountain I had often walked and jogged up with friends and students. Most of us were in shoes not at all suited for the endeavor. As the sun set, we realized we would not reach the summit. We paused on a little hill and enjoyed the pristine Alpine landscape. I felt that we were truly connected to one another and that this was a time when people would tend to be truthful. I asked if they were truly going to come to Germany and start the institute, or if they were negotiating with the MPS only in order to try to extort resources from their current institutions in exchange for not leaving, a behavior not uncommon among successful academics. They all said that they would come. Once the sun had disappeared behind the mountaintops, we walked down under tall trees as night was falling. We talked excitedly about the new institute and what we might do there. We all had solidly empirical research programs, we were interested not only in what we did ourselves but in what the others did, and we were all about the same age. I realized that this new institute would happen, and that I would likely be happy there.

  There were still many things to work out with the Max Planck Society and among ourselves. A major question was where in the former East Germany the new institute would be located. The MPS had a clear idea. It was to be in Rostock, a small Hanseatic harbor city on the Baltic coast—and the society had a compelling reason. Germany is a federal country composed of sixteen states. Each state pays into the MPS according to the size of its economy. So politicians obviously want as many institutes as possible located in their home states so that they “get their money’s worth.” The state where Rostock is located, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, was the only one without a Max Planck Institute, so it obviously had a good reason to demand one. I could sympathize but I felt that our mission was to ensure that the new institute was scientifically successful, not that some political balance among states was upheld. With just about two hundred thousand inhabitants, Rostock was small, had no international airport, and was almost completely unknown outside Germany. I felt it would be hard to attract good people there. I wanted the new institute to be in Berlin. This, I quickly realized, was not going to happen. A huge number of federal institutions had moved there from the former West Germany. To add our institute to the list would be politically impossible and even difficult in practical terms.

  The MPS continued to push for Rostock and arranged a visit to the city, where the mayor and his associates would explain the advantages of the place and show us around. I was firmly against Rostock and told the MPS that not only would I not participate in the visit but would be happy to continue to work at the university in Munich. Up to that point, I believed the MPS officials had thought that I was just playing tricks with them when I said I would not move to Rostock. Now, they realized that I would indeed not come if the institute was in Rostock.

  Discussion about possible alternative locations followed. To me, two cities in the southern state of Saxony, Leipzig and Dresden, seemed to have good future prospects. They were both fairly large and had a long-standing industrial tradition as well as a state government that was keen on connecting to that tradition. In addition, another Max Planck Institute was being planned for Saxony—one organized by the brilliant Finnish-born cell biologist Kai Simons. I had met him a few times as a graduate student back in the days when I worked on how cells deal with viral proteins, and I was sure that it would become a great institute. My dream was to have the two institutes next to each other to create a campus where synergies between our group and their institute would be possible. Unfortunately, Germany’s federal structure thwarted this vision. It was hard enough to argue that the two largest new institutes to be started in East Germany, ours and Kai’s, should both be located in the state of Saxony; that they would also be in the same city was totally impossible to imagine. Since Kai and his colleagues were ahead of us in their planning and had already settled on Dresden, we looked at Leipzig. By and large we liked what we saw.

  The city had a beautiful city center that had largely survived the war, a great cultural scene with world-class music and art, and, importantly, a zoo that was open to the possibility of cooperating in building a facility where Mike Tomasello could study the cognitive development of the great apes. It also had a large university, which is the second oldest in Germany. During our discussions with the university I came to realize that it had been even more heavily politicized during the time of the German Democratic Republic than other universities, perhaps because it was the center for the sensitive areas of teacher training and journalism studies. Many of the best professors, either by choice or by necessity, had been very involved with the Communist Party, and after the collapse of the GDR they had been forced to leave their jobs. A few had even committed suicide as a result. The ones who got to keep their jobs were mostly those who’d had bleak academic careers in the GDR. In some cases their careers had been thwarted due to political persecution, but most of them had not distinguished themselves for the same reasons that people in the West do not—lack of talent, lack of ambition, or other priorities in life.

  The positions vacated by the politically compromised faculty had mostly been filled by academics from West Germany. Unfortunately, the best people in the west did not tend to make the leap to go east and take on the extra challenges and problems this involved. Instead, those who came were often people who saw this as a chance to get out of a professional ­dead end. I realized how lucky we were to be able to start an institution from scratch, without the burden of a troubled history. In Dresden the university seemed more ready to take up the challenge of the new times. But we could not have everything. I hoped that over a longer period of time the university in Leipzig would develop the flexibility needed to move forward. On the positive side, Leipzig was a very livable city—even more so than Dresden. I was sure we would be able to convince people to move there. In 1998 our group moved into temporary laboratory space in Leipzig.

  We worked hard to get our research going in the new environment and to plan a new large institute building. It was an exhilarating experience. The MPS provided us with ample resources, which enabled me to design a laboratory perfectly suited to our needs and to the ways in which I thought my department should function. This meant, for example, abolishing closed seminar rooms. I decided that the area where our departmental seminars and weekly research meetings were held should be open to the corridor, to do away with the feeling that a meeting was a closed affair for invited participants only. Anyone coming by should be able to listen in, contribute to the discussions, and leave again.

  I hoped to attract many people from outside Germany to the institute. I felt that it was very important to create a work environment where scientists and students
who had come to Leipzig could develop a social life and a feeling of community with their colleagues and the local students. To help facilitate this I convinced the architects to put in areas in the building for table tennis, table soccer, and even a forty-five-foot climbing wall in the entrance hall. Finally, inspired by the social role of the sauna in my native Scandinavia, I convinced the surprised architects that we needed a sauna on the roof of the building.

  But most importantly I could for the first time design a clean room for ancient DNA extractions that was to my specifications. This largely meant giving free reign to my paranoia about contamination from human DNA stuck to dust particles. The “clean room” was in fact not just a single room but several rooms. They would be located in the basement of the building, where you could enter the clean facility without coming even close to laboratories where modern DNA was being handled. In the clean facility, you would first enter a room where you would change to sterile clothing. You would then enter a preliminary room where somewhat “dirty” work, such as grinding bone samples to powder, would be done. From there you would enter the innermost room, where DNA extractions and manipulations of the extracted DNA would be performed. Here, too, the valuable DNA extracts would be stored in special freezers. All work here would be done in hoods where the air was filtered (see Figure 7.1). In addition, the air of the entire facility would be circulated and filtered. It was to be sucked through a grid on the floor, and 99.995 percent of all particulates larger than 0.2 thousands of a millimeter would be removed from it before it was returned to the room. We constructed not one but two such facilities in the basement so that different types of work—for example, on extinct animals and on Neanderthals—could be separated. No reagents or equipment would ever be allowed to pass from one of the clean rooms to the other, so that if we ever had contamination in one of the rooms the other one would be unaffected. I felt that this facility would finally let me sleep more calmly at night.

  Figure 7.1. The innermost of our clean rooms at the Max Planck institute in Leipzig. Photo: MPI-EVA.

  Of course, the building and the facilities were of secondary importance to the people who would work there. I looked for group leaders who would work on different but related topics so that the different groups could help and stimulate each other. One scientist I very much wanted to attract to Leipzig was Mark Stoneking. But there were complications.

  Mark had done his PhD in Berkeley with Allan Wilson, and it was there that I met him during my postdoc period. He had worked on mitochondrial variation in humans and was one of the main people behind the “Mitochondrial Eve” theory—the realization that the variation in the human mitochondrial genome had its origin in Africa within the last 100,000 or 200,000 years. At that time Mark had worked with Linda Vigilant, a graduate student, using the then-novel PCR to sequence a variable part of the mitochondrial genome from people in Africa, Europe, and Asia. Together with Allan they had published a very influential paper in Science that seemed to nail the out-of-Africa story. Although later challenged on statistical grounds, their conclusions nevertheless had stood the test of time. During those heady times in Berkeley, I had been struck by Linda’s cute boyish looks when she came into the lab on a motorcycle every day, and by her smarts. But at the time I was emotionally involved both with a boyfriend and with my engagement in the AIDS support group. So I was not crushed when Mark became involved with Linda. They ended up marrying, moving to Penn State University, and having two children. But my connection to Linda was not to end there.

  In 1996, six years after I had left Berkeley, Mark, Linda, and their two young boys came to Munich to spend a sabbatical year in my research group. We often made excursions to the Alps together—for example, to my favorite Hirschberg—and they often borrowed my car. Linda did not work in the lab but took care of the kids. In the evenings she sometimes wanted time off from the family and we started going to the cinema together. We got along well and I did not think very much about our relationship until one of my graduate students jokingly said that he thought Linda liked me. This made me aware of the tension between us, most tangibly in the dark movie theaters where we watched alternative European films. One night, in a theater not far from my apartment, our knees touched in the dark, perhaps by chance. Neither of us retracted our knees. Soon we were holding hands. And Linda did not go directly home after the movie.

  I had always thought of myself as gay. In the street, I would certainly mostly notice good-looking guys. But I had also been attracted to women, especially those who knew what they wanted and could be assertive. I’d had relationships with two women before. Yet, I thought that being together with Linda, who was married to a colleague and had two children, was not a great idea. It could be a temporary thing at most. But over weeks and months it became more and more clear that we understood each other at many levels, also sexually. Nevertheless, when Mark and Linda returned to Penn State University after their year in Munich, I was sure that my relationship with Linda would end. But that was not to be.

  Just as the Max Planck Society started discussing the new institute with me, Penn State contacted me and offered me an attractive endowed professorship. I was torn. I realized that I probably did not want to live in the staid, rural atmosphere of State College. But I also realized that having a serious job offer might make my negotiations with the MPS easier. And another less well-formulated reason may have been at play. I did not mind having to visit State College because Linda was there. I ended up traveling to Penn State a number of times, and Linda and I kept meeting.

  This was a difficult time. Not only did I have secrets from Mark, I had secrets with Mark: even as Penn State University was trying to recruit me, I discussed with Mark the possibility of his coming to the new Leipzig institute. All this secrecy and double play finally became too much for me. Perhaps influenced by the double life my father had led (he had two families, one of which did not know about the existence of the other), I had always prided myself on being open and not having secrets in my private life. Yet, here I was living at least a mild version of my father’s double life. I convinced Linda that if we intended to continue seeing each other she had better tell Mark what was going on. She did. There was the expected crisis. But the fact that Linda was open with Mark rather early in our relationship may have made the crisis less severe than it would otherwise have been. With time, Mark showed that he was able to separate his private from his professional feelings and after a while he was able to entertain the possibility of moving to Leipzig. Scientifically, this was a great boon for the institute. I was able to convince the MPS to offer him a permanent professorship and create a budget for him. In 1998, when our institute started, Mark, Linda, and their two boys moved to Leipzig and Mark transferred his research group to our institute. Luckily, Linda was also able to find a job at the institute. Christophe Boesch, who was busy planning his department of primatology, was concerned about finding someone who would be able to run a genetics lab focused on wild apes. This would mean relying on strange sources of DNA such as feces and hair left behind by chimpanzees and gorillas in the jungle and collected by the field researchers. Linda had based a large part of her dissertation research at Berkeley on getting DNA out of single hairs for analysis of human genetic variation. I could with a good conscience recommend her to Christophe, and Linda ended up heading up the genetics laboratory in the primatology department.

  We all moved into a small apartment building I had bought and renovated. Over the years, Linda and I became closer and Mark found new love while everyday life in our house went on without any great problems. In June 2004, Linda and I were vacationing at Tegernsee. Once again, we were walking down from Hirschberg late one evening. At that point we started talking about the fact that we were getting on in life. We did not have unlimited time in front of ourselves. Unexpectedly, Linda said that if I wanted to have a child she would like one, too. I had played with the idea, and joked about it with her, but now it became clear to me that I very much wanted a ch
ild. In May 2005, our son Rune was born.

  Over the years that ensued, our lives kept changing, but in small steps. Linda and Mark divorced amicably, and in 2008 Linda and I married. The institute turned out to be a uniquely successful place where researchers, regardless of whether they came from what was traditionally thought of as “humanities” or “sciences,” were able to work together. The tradition of hiring the best from all over the world was continued when a fifth department was founded by the French paleontologist Jean-Jacques Hublin. It is a testimony to the attractiveness of our institute that he passed up an almost certain appointment to the College de France, one of the most prestigious institutions in France, to come to the Leipzig institute. In fact, in the fifteen years since the founding of our institute, large universities elsewhere, such as Cambridge University in the UK and Tübingen University in Germany, have copied our concept. Sometimes I wonder why it has worked out so well. One odd reason may be that we were all new to Germany and felt that as we had started this institute together, we had better get along well with each other and make it work. Another may be that even though we are all interested in similar questions, our areas of expertise do not overlap, meaning that there is little direct competition and rivalry among us. Yet another is the generous support from the MPS, allowing us to avoid the petty competition for meager resources that poisons the atmosphere at many universities. Indeed, this has all worked out so well that I sometimes think I should return to the little hill on Hirschberg close to Munich where in 1996 the four founding directors watched the sunset together. I would then erect a small kern as a private little monument to commemorate that something important once happened there. Perhaps one day I will do that.