STOCKHOLM/LONDON, Oct 3 (Reuters) – Swedish geneticist Svante Paabo won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for his discoveries that underpin our understanding of how modern humans evolved from extinct ancestors .
Paabo, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, won the prize for “discoveries concerning extinct hominin genomes and human evolution,” the prize committee said.
Paabo was “overwhelmed” and “very happy,” said Thomas Perlmann, secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, after calling the scientist to tell him the news.
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Paabo, 67, said he thought the call up from Sweden was something to make his summer home there.
“So I was just having the last cup of tea to pick up my daughter from her nanny where she spent the night,” Paabo said in an audio recording posted on Nobel’s website.
“And then I got this call from Sweden and of course I thought it had something to do with our little summer house in Sweden…I thought the lawn mower had broken down or something that.”
When asked if he thought he would get the award, he replied, “No, I’ve already received a few awards, but I didn’t think it would really qualify for a Nobel Prize.”
Paabo, the son of a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, has been credited with transforming the study of human origins after he developed ways to examine DNA sequences from archaeological and paleontological remains dating back to the dawn of human history.
Not only did he help uncover the existence of a previously unknown human species called the Denisovans, from a 40,000-year-old finger bone fragment discovered in Siberia, but his crowning achievement is considered the methods developed to enable the sequencing of an entire Neanderthal genome.
This research, which showed that some genes of Neanderthal origin are retained in the genomes of people today, was once considered impossible, given that Neanderthal DNA on bones shrivelled for thousands of years. years into short fragments that must be put together like a gigantic puzzle. , and are also heavily contaminated with microbial DNA.
“This ancient gene flow to present-day humans has physiological relevance today, affecting for example how our immune system responds to infections,” the Nobel committee said in a statement on Monday.
“GENETIC DIFFERENCES”
The prize, among the most prestigious in the scientific world, is awarded by the Nobel Assembly at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($900,357).
This is the first batch of prizes this year.
Born in Stockholm, Paabo studied medicine and biochemistry at Uppsala University before creating a scientific discipline called “paleogenomics”, which helped shed light on the genetic differences that distinguish living humans from extinct hominins.
“His findings provide the basis for exploring what makes us uniquely human,” the Committee said.
“A scientist who helps us better understand our own species – and who today is rightly recognized for that,” German Education and Research Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger tweeted on Monday.
Created in the will of the Swedish inventor of dynamite and wealthy businessman Alfred Nobel, the prizes for achievement in the fields of science, literature and peace have been awarded since 1901, although the prize d economy is a later addition.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought medical research to the fore and many expect that the development of the vaccines that have brought the world back to some sense of normalcy may eventually be rewarded.
Yet it usually takes many years for a given piece of research to be honored, with the committees responsible for choosing the winners seeking to determine its full value with some certainty among what is always a field of contenders.
When asked why the award wasn’t given to advances in the fight against COVID, Perlmann said it was a good question that he wasn’t going to answer.
“We only talk about people who receive the Nobel Prize and not about those who do not receive it or have not yet received it.”
However, Paabo’s former forensic work has shed more light on why some people are at higher risk for severe COVID.
PANDEMIC
In 2020, a report by Paabo and colleagues found that a genetic variant inherited by modern humans from Neanderthals when they interbred around 60,000 years ago, made those carrying the variant more likely to require artificial ventilation. if they were infected with the virus causing COVID.
“We can make an average gauge of the number of additional deaths that we had in the pandemic due to the contribution of Neanderthals. It is quite substantial, it is more than a million additional individuals who died because of this Neanderthal variant that they carry,” Paabo said at the 2022 conference.
Paabo’s most cited paper in the Web of Science was published in 1989, with 4,077 citations, said David Pendlebury of British scientific data analysis provider Clarivate.
“Only some 2,000 of the 55 million papers published since 1970 have been cited that many times,” he said.
It is clear that the Nobel Assembly has decided that this groundbreaking research on genetics and evolution falls within the range of topics that should be recognized, he added.
“It is not, however, a prize for a discovery relevant to clinical medicine, which many were anticipating this year after a physiology-focused Nobel prize last year.”
Past winners in the field include a series of famous researchers, including Alexander Fleming, who shared the 1945 prize for the discovery of penicillin, and Robert Koch, who previously won in 1905 for his research on tuberculosis.
($1 = 11.1067 Swedish crowns)
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Reporting by Niklas Pollard, Simon Johnson in Stockholm and Natalie Grover in London; additional reporting by Terje Solsvik in Oslo, Anna Ringstrom in Stockholm and Marie Mannes in Gdansk, editing by William Maclean
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