Young Innovator Profile: Beth Shapiro

If you're trying to isolate dodo DNA, follow these steps: First, find a dodo bone that hasn't fossilized. This should be easy. Among the few known in the world are a skull and a left foot that are stored in boxes on the second floor of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. They've been in the university's possession since 1683, around the time the last dodo died. It's not a big museum, but if you get lost, look for a small plaque next to the entrance to the storeroom, where a legendary debate over Charles Darwin's theory of evolution took place in 1860.

The hard part, as biologist Beth Shapiro discovered in 2000, will be convincing collections manager Malgosia Nowak-Kemp to let you take a drill to the ultimate nonrenewable resource. True, you won't need to destroy much — a fragment the size of a pinkie fingernail should suffice — but it's safe to say you won't get a second chance. Try not to let the pressure get to you. "Here's this very famous specimen, a very finite resource, and a short American comes in and wants to take a chunk out of it," Shapiro says. "[Nowak-Kemp] wasn't nearly as scared as I was."

The next step is a polymerase chain reaction. Used for everything from paternity tests to cloning, a PCR requires a well-equipped lab. Before you step inside, put on a clean suit, like those found in computer chip factories, to avoid contaminating your sample with modern DNA.

Ready? OK: Grind the dodo bone to a fine powder. Dissolve it in a water-based solution. Mix in magnesium and DNA polymerases — enzymes that help genes make copies of themselves. Heat the mixture to about 150 degrees Fahrenheit (65.5 degrees Celsius) to break DNA chains into two strands. Cool it, letting the polymerase enzymes latch on to the dodo's DNA and build copies of it. Repeat at least 30 times. By morning, you should have a test tube with about a million copies of a dodo gene or gene fragment.

For Shapiro, 31, this deceptively simple-sounding procedure has proved to be a recipe for success. When she arrived at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar in 1999, she apprenticed herself to Alan Cooper, a pioneer in the brand-new field of ancient DNA. In the eight years since, Shapiro has risen to the top of the tiny, high-profile, overwhelmingly young community of ancient-DNA researchers.

Ancient DNA research analyzes the genes of long-dead plants and animals — letting scientists trace the evolution, and extinction, of species with a precision unimaginable just five years ago. By comparing dodo DNA with the genes of five other species, for example, Shapiro's research established that the flightless bird was a distant relative of the pigeon.

Shapiro has traveled the world in search of DNA samples, ancient and otherwise. Last summer, she flew to the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius to search for unfossilized dodo bones to compare with the Oxford specimen — to no avail.

DNA tends to come in lots of tiny fragments, and without a living animal, there's no way to reconstruct which genes come into play at which stages of the dodo's development. In short: No dodo mama, no dodo baby.

Shapiro hopes her research can help prevent modern species from going the way of the dodo.

This article is excerpted from "How to Make A Dodo" by Andrew Curry, which originally appeared in SMITHSONIAN, October 2007. Curry wrote about Romania's painted monasteries in the June issue of Smithsonian. He lives in Berlin.

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