Stockholm. This year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Sweden’s Svante Pääbo, a researcher specializing in human evolution at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm announced.
Pääbo, born in Stockholm in 1955, has been director and scientific member of the Evolutionary Anthropology section of that institute since 1999. Among other things, he was the first researcher to sequence the Neanderthal genome.
He was also involved in the discovery of an extinct relative of modern humans, the Denisovan hominid, and showed that both Denisovans and Neanderthals contributed genes that still exist in modern humans.
“By revealing the genetic traits that distinguish living humans from extinct hominins, their discoveries lay the groundwork for exploring what makes us uniquely human,” the Nobel jury noted.
Pääbo’s findings around the secrets of Neanderthal DNA provided key insights into our immune systems, including our vulnerability to severe covid-19.
The techniques he spearheaded allowed researchers to compare the genome of modern humans and that of other hominins, both Denisovans and Neanderthals.
“Just as you do an archaeological dig to find out about the past, we do it in the human genome,” he said at a press conference held by the Max Planck Institute.
gene flow
“Pääbo and his team also found that gene flow had occurred from Neanderthals to the Homo sapiens, which shows that they had children together during the periods of coexistence, ”said Anna Wedell, chair of the Nobel Committee.
The geneticist and his team managed to extract DNA from a small finger bone found in a cave in Siberia, leading to the recognition of a new species of ancient humans whom they named Denisovans.
Wedell called it “a sensational discovery” that showed that Neanderthals and Denisovans were sister groups that diverged about 600,000 years ago. Denisovan genes have been found in up to 6 percent of modern humans in Asia and Southeast Asia, indicating that interbreeding occurred there, too.
He also pondered what would have happened if Neanderthals had survived another 40,000 years.
“Would we see even worse racism against Neanderthals, because in a sense they were really different from us? Or would we really see our place in the world of the living quite differently when we would have other forms of humans there that are very much like us, but still different?” he wondered.
surprise victory
Pääbo said he was surprised to hear of his win, initially thinking it was an elaborate prank from his colleagues or a call about his summer home in Sweden.
“I was having my last cup of tea before I went to pick up my daughter, who spent the night with her nanny, and then I got this call from Sweden,” she said in an interview on the Nobel Prize home page. “I thought, ‘oh, the lawnmower broke down or something’” at the summer house.
During the celebrations after the press conference in Leipzig, his teammates threw him into a fountain. The scientist took it with humor.
Pääbo, 67, completed his award-winning studies at the University of Munich and the Max Planck Institute. His father, Sune Bergstrom, won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1982, the eighth time that the son or daughter of a laureate has also won the award.
in his book Neanderthal Man: In Search of the Lost Genomes, Pääbo described himself as Bergstrom’s “secret extramarital son”, something he also briefly mentioned yesterday.
His father took a great interest in his work, he recalled, but it was his mother who encouraged him the most.
“The biggest influence in my life was without a doubt my mother, with whom I grew up,” he said in the Nobel interview. “In a way it makes me a little sad that she can’t be with me today. Karin Päävo, an Estonian chemist, has motivated me a lot over the years.”
When he was young Pääbo thought of dedicating himself to Egyptology, after a trip with his mother to Egypt. But he ended up studying medicine, like his father, at Uppsala University (north of Stockholm).
“Would it be possible to study ancient DNA sequences and thus understand how ancient Egyptians are linked to those of today?” he wrote in his book. “These are fascinating questions, and I wasn’t the first to ask them,” he added.
Thanks to his knowledge of biochemistry, he managed to isolate DNA fragments from human or animal mummies. In 1985 she managed to identify the genetic traces of the mummy of a child who died 2,400 years ago.
He studied the remains of a Neanderthal at the University of Munich in the mid-1990s.
In 1996, with his team, he identified the first fragment of mitochondrial DNA (transmitted by the mother) of the extinct lineage from a piece of bone from 40 thousand years ago.
The Max Planck Institute called it and Pääbo founded a research center for paleogenetics.
In 2010 he achieved “the almost impossible task” of fully sequencing the Neanderthal genome, highlights the Nobel Committee statement.
The geneticist’s team published the first draft of a Neanderthal genome in 2009 and sequenced more than 60 percent of the genome from a small bone sample.
Major risk factor
Pääbo indicated that during the pandemic they discovered that “the greatest risk factor for getting seriously ill and even dying when infected with the SARS-Cov-2 virus has reached modern people from Neanderthals. So we and others are now intensively studying the Neanderthal versus the modern protective version to try to understand what the functional difference would be.
“The genetic differences between the Homo sapiens and those close relatives, already disappeared, were unknown, until Pääbo managed to identify them”, added the Nobel Committee.
Pääbo had to be hospitalized in the late 2000s due to a pulmonary embolism. When investigating his own health problem, he discovers that his father investigated heparin in 1943, an anticoagulant that saved his life, as he wrote in his 2014 book.
Svante Pääbo is married to another scientist at the Max Planck Institute, Linda Vigilant. They have two children.
The prizes have a cash endowment of almost 900 thousand dollars and will be delivered on December 10. The money comes from a legacy left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.
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