Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo, whose path-breaking work includes sequencing the very first Neanderthal DNA, has won the Nobel Prize in Medicine 2022.
Svante Pääbo is the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He has been associated with several prominent research institutes around the world.
Pääbo was born in Stockholm in 1955. His father, Sune Bergström, was himself a Nobel winner. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1982, along with Bengt I. Samuelsson and John R. Vane.
Pääbo studied medicine and Egyptology. Since the initial years of his career, he was fascinated by the possibility studying the DNA of Neanderthals -- archaic humans who existed thousands of years ago -- using modern techniques. Along with pioneering biologist Allan Wilson, he embarked on a decades-long project to develop methods for this study.
His research eventually led him to achieve something considered impossible before: the sequencing of Neanderthal genome. He also discovered Denisova -- a previously unknown hominin.
"Svante Pääbo found that gene transfer had occurred from these now extinct hominins to Homo sapiens," the Nobel foundation said while announcing the award. "This ancient flow of genes to present-day humans has physiological relevance today, for example affecting how our immune system reacts to infections."
He gets the credit for developing a whole new discipline called paleogenomics -- which focusses on the analysis of "genomic information in extinct species".
Pääbo won the Nobel "for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.”
His discoveries are significant in that they create the foundation for exploring what makes us uniquely human.
Also read: Svante Pääbo wins Nobel Prize 2022 in Physiology or Medicine
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