Speaking of Jo Marchant, she has a long article in the current Nature about the mummy DNA controversy ("Ancient DNA: Curse of the Pharoah's DNA").
I wrote about the problem earlier this year: "Mummy troubles". My opinion is that this work has been relentlessly hyped and hasn't presented adequate information to assess whether the results are genuine:
Can we accurately type STR alleles from mummies? I wouldn't rule it out given the quantity of tissue available, but there should be many more controls for a high-profile study like this one. The work took place over several years, so it's a bit unrealistic to expect the latest sequencing methods. But JAMA and the Discovery Channel presented the results as important science. They should have ensured that solid answers for the obvious questions were at hand.
Marchant digs up some quotes from the authors:
The researchers deny that the television involvement put them under excessive pressure to produce dramatic results. But working for the cameras did make a challenging project even tougher, says Pusch. "Each time they came in to film, we had to close the lab for a week to clean." Eventually the TV crew was banished and the lab scenes reconstructed.
The article gives an interesting sociology of the competing groups of ancient DNA researchers. I dispute that the field is evenly divided, however. There are a very long list of laboratories doing ancient DNA work according to standardized protocols on skeletal remains from the past several thousand years. Only a few groups claim to be working with nuclear DNA or microbial DNA, the areas of contention in the mummies. Among that small set of labs, most follow similar, conservative techniques.
Then there are the handful that come up with "surprising" results time and again. If the surprising results are accompanied by substantial evidence, I have no problem. But when a paper has no clear explanation why it arrives at results that others think impossible, that raises my skepticism.