MUMMY DEAREST: The mummified remains of Terézia Hausmann, whose body was recovered from the Dominican Church in Vác, Hungary.HUNGARIAN NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM
In 1997, when the field of paleomicrobiology was just emerging, University College London microbiologists Helen Donoghue and Mark Spigelman attended a conference in Hungary focused on the evolution of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of tuberculosis (TB). A few years earlier, Spigelman and PhD student Eshetu Lemma had published the first paper on ancient M. tuberculosis DNA, examining centuries-old samples using PCR (Int J Osteoarchaeol, 3:137-43, 1993). At the conference, Spigelman and Donoghue presented work they’d done to recover M. tuberculosis DNA from much-more-recent human skeletal remains, collected as part of a forensic case dating to the mid-20th century.
In the audience was Ildikó Pap, head of the anthropology department at the Hungarian Natural History Museum, who’d come to the conference to speak about a ...
