Swedish gene historian Svante Paabo, who sequenced the Neanderthal genome and discovered Denisova, a previously unknown precursor to Homo sapiens, won the Nobel Prize for Medicine on Monday, the first of this year’s awards from the Swedish Academy.
Svante Paabo is a paleogeneticist, someone who studies the distant past by examining preserved genetic material.
“By revealing genetic differences that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominins, his discoveries provide the basis for exploring what makes us uniquely human,” the Nobel committee said in a statement.
Hominins are pre-human species that either became extinct or were exterminated by the parents of modern humans.
Paabo, head of the department of genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in the German city of Leipzig, found that gene transfer had occurred from these now-extinct hominins to Homo sapiens after the migration out of Africa about 70,000 years ago.
“This ancient flow of genes into modern humans has physiological relevance today, for example influencing how our immune system responds to infections,” the jury said.
Covid-19 patients with a small amount of Neanderthal DNA are at a higher risk of serious complications of the disease, Paabo reported in a 2020 study.
Paabo takes home the prize sum of 10 million Swedish kronor (901,500 euros), receiving the prize from King Carl Gustaf at a solemn ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the death of scientist Alfred Nobel in 1896, who created the prizes in his last will and testament.
Last year, the medicine prize went to the American couple David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for discoveries about receptors for temperature and touch, which have been used to develop treatments for a wide range of diseases and conditions, including chronic pain.
Nobel season continues this week with the announcement of the winners of the physics prize on Tuesday and the chemistry prize on Wednesday.
The literature is too narrow to call
They will be followed by the much-anticipated awards for literature on Thursday and peace on Friday.
American novelist Joyce Carol Oates, France’s Annie Ernaux and Maryse Conde, Russia’s Lyudmila Ulitskaya and Canada’s Margaret Atwood have all been cited as potential literary prize winners if the committee has its eye on a woman.
However, online betting sites have France’s Michel Houellebecq as their favourite, ahead of British author Salman Rushdie, who was the victim of an attack in August.
Among those mentioned as possible peace prize winners are the International Criminal Court, which is tasked with investigating war crimes in Ukraine, the imprisoned Russian dissident Alexei Navalny and the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg.
The economy price ends on Monday 10 October.
Source: sn.dk