On Monday, Svante Paabo, a Swedish scientist, was awarded the Nobel Prize 2022 in Medicine for his exceptional discovery, which confirms that modern humans share DNA with bygone relatives Neanderthals and Denisovans. He has provided crucial insights concerning the human immune system and what makes us distinctive compared to our extinct cousins. Svante’s father, Sune Bergstrom, was the Nobel prize winner in 1982.
The Nobel committee announced the prize after scientists mapped the DNA of the Neanderthal, an extinct cousin of modern humans, and made the spectacular discovery of Denisova, a yet unknown hominin.
“Paabo and his team also surprisingly found that gene flow had occurred from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens, demonstrating that they had children together during periods of co-existence,” Anna Wedell, chairman of the Nobel Committee, said.
Svante Paabo, who was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1955, is the existing director at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. In 1980, he finished his medical studies at the University of Uppsala. He started part-time research and teaching at the Uppsala Department of Cell Biology and the Roche Institute for Molecular Biology. In 1986, he received his Ph.D. and began postdoctoral studies at the Institute for Molecular Biology II. He completed his prize-winning studies at the University of Munich in Germany.
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Paabo led the development of new methods that allowed researchers to compare the genome of contemporary humans and other hominins, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans.
