After an early phase of discouragement, Johannes Krause was able to follow his long interest in genetics and even link it to another passion of his, paleoanthropology. Krause initially chose to study biochemistry at the University of Leipzig. But “I was almost about to quit” at the frustration of learning much more about basic chemistry than biology, he says. However, in the third year of his bachelor’s degree, he took some specialised courses in genetics as an Erasmus student at the University College Cork in Ireland that revived his interest for the field.

Back in Leipzig, a summer internship on comparing gene expression between humans and chimpanzees at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology sparked Krause’s enthusiasm for good. He stayed on in the lab as a research assistant for 2 years before graduating in 2005. While there, Krause helped develop a biological method to read large pieces of ancient DNA, sequence the complete mitochondrial genome of the mammoth from fossil samples, and place it in the context of evolution. “Johannes has great technical skill and the judgment to distinguish a good project from a blind alley. Like few others he can see the interesting pattern that can hide in sometimes confusing data,” Svante Pääbo, his principal investigator, writes in an e-mail to Science Careers.