Marianne Sommer is professor for Kulturwissenschaften and SNSF-professor for the history of science and science studies at the University of Lucerne. Prior to her current position, she has been at the University of Zurich, ETH Zurich, Stanford University, Pennsylvania State University, and the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Her research and publications have focused on the cultural history of the life, earth, and human sciences, with a particular interest in the human origins sciences. Her latest monograph represents a (pre)history of paleoanthropology and related disciplines from ca. 1800 to the present that is told along the lines of the biography of a particular human fossil skeleton (Bones and Ochre, Harvard University Press, 2007). With a small research team she currently works on the two Swiss National Science Foundation projects ‘History Within: The Phylogenetic Memory of Bones, Organisms, and Molecules’ and ‘Collecting Humanity: How Human Remains Are Made into Museum Objects’ (see Website)