Swedish scientist Svante Pääbo has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology (Medicine) for the year 2022.
Key points
- He has been awarded “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.”
- Paabo, son of the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Sune Bergström, has been credited with transforming the study of human origins after developing approaches to allow for the examination of DNA sequences from archaeological and paleontological remains.
- Through his pioneering research, Svante Pääbo accomplished something seemingly impossible: sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans.
- He also brought to light the existence of a previously unknown human species called the Denisovans, from a 40,000-year-old fragment of a finger bone discovered in Siberia.
- “Through his groundbreaking research, Svante Pääbo established an entirely new scientific discipline, paleogenomics. Following the initial discoveries, his group has completed analyses of several additional genome sequences from extinct hominins. Pääbo’s discoveries have established a unique resource, which is utilized extensively by the scientific community to better understand human evolution and migration. New powerful methods for sequence analysis indicate that archaic hominins may also have mixed with Homo sapiens in Africa. However, no genomes from extinct hominins in Africa have yet been sequenced due to accelerated degradation of archaic DNA in tropical climates.
- Due to to Svante Pääbo’s discoveries, world now understand that archaic gene sequences from our extinct relatives influence the physiology of present-day humans.
- One such example is the Denisovan version of the gene EPAS1, which confers an advantage for survival at high altitude and is common among present-day Tibetans.
- Other examples are Neanderthal genes that affect our immune response to different types of infections.
- The Nobel prize for Medicine, arguably among the most prestigious in the scientific world, is awarded by the Nobel Assembly of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($900,357). It is the first of this year’s batch of prizes.
