- Paabo “very happy” when he found out about the award
- His findings are crucial for understanding human evolution
- Neaderthal genome sequenced to show connection to modern humans
- Discoveries that are relevant today, for example for the immune system
- Medicine is the first of this year’s prizes to be awarded
STOCKHOLM/LONDON, October 3 – Swedish geneticist Svante Paabo on Monday received the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries that advance our understanding of how modern humans evolved from extinct ancestors early in human history.
Paabo’s work showed practical implications during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he found that people infected with the virus who carry a gene variant inherited from Neanderthals are at higher risk of serious illnesses than those who don’t.
Paabo, director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, won the award for “Discoveries about the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution,” according to the award committee.
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“The amazing thing for me is that you now have some ability to go back in time and actually track genetic history and genetic changes over time,” Paabo said at a press conference at the Max Planck Institute. “It’s a way of actually looking at evolution in real time if you want to.”
Paabo, 67, said he thought the call from Sweden was a hoax or something to do with his summer home there.
“So I just had the last cup of tea to pick my daughter up from her nanny where she was staying,” Paabo said in a recording posted to the Nobel website.
“And then I got this call from Sweden and of course I thought it had something to do with our little summer house… I thought the lawn mower was broken or something.”
When asked if he thought he would get the prize, he said, “No, I’ve gotten a few awards, but somehow I didn’t think it really qualifies for a Nobel prize.”
The son of a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, Paabo is credited with transforming the study of human origins after devising ways to allow the study of DNA sequences from archaeological and paleontological remains.
Not only did he help uncover 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, his crowning glory is credited with being the method developed to enable the sequencing of a complete Neanderthal genome.
‘GENETIC DIFFERENCES’
This research, which showed that certain Neanderthal genes are now preserved in the human genome, was once considered impossible because the Neanderthal DNA on the bones has shrunk over thousands of years into short fragments that have to be put together like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle are also heavily contaminated with microbial DNA.
“This ancient flow of genes to modern-day humans has physiological relevance today and influences, for example, how our immune system reacts to infections,” said the Nobel Prize Committee.
The prize is one of the most prestigious in the scientific world and is awarded by the Karolinska Institute of Sweden’s Nobel Assembly. It is endowed with 10 million Swedish kronor (900,357 US dollars).
2020 Japan Prize-winning Swedish geneticist Svante Paabo poses with his trophy during the Japan Prize awarding ceremony in Tokyo, Japan, April 13, 2022. This year’s Japan Prize honored the winners, including 2020 and 2021 .Eugene Hoshiko/Pool via Portal/File Photo
It is the first of this year’s series of awards.
Born in Stockholm, Paabo studied medicine and biochemistry at Uppsala University before founding a scientific discipline called “palaeogenomics,” which helped reveal genetic differences that distinguish living humans from extinct hominins.
“His discoveries provide the basis for exploring what makes us uniquely human,” the committee said.
The COVID-19 pandemic has put medical research in the spotlight, with many anticipating that the development of vaccines that have allowed the world to regain some sense of normality could ultimately be rewarded.
Nonetheless, it typically takes many years for any given research to be recognized, with the committees charged with selecting the winners attempting to determine its full value with some certainty in what is always a crowded field of competitors.
PANDEMIC
When asked why the award didn’t go to advances in fighting COVID, Thomas Perlmann, secretary of the Nobel Committee on Physiology or Medicine, said the committee would only speak about award winners, not those who hadn’t or had yet to win.
However, Paabo’s old forensic work offered insight into why some people are at higher risk of severe COVID.
In 2020, a report by Paabo and colleagues found that a gene variant inherited by modern humans from Neanderthals when they interbred about 60,000 years ago meant those who carried the variant were more likely to be mechanically ventilated had to be if they were infected with the virus that caused COVID.
“We can average the number of extra deaths we’ve had in the pandemic due to the contribution of Neanderthals. It’s quite significant, it’s more than a million additional people who died because of this Neanderthal variant,” Paabo said in the 2022 talk.
Paabo’s most-cited paper on the Web of Science was published in 1989 with 4,077 citations, said David Pendlebury of British scientific data analysis provider Clarivate.
“Only about 2,000 of the 55 million papers published since 1970 have been cited that many times,” he said.
“However, it is not an award for a discovery relevant to clinical medicine, which many expected this year after a Nobel Prize in Physiology last year.”
Previous winners in this field include a number of famous researchers, notably Alexander Fleming, who shared the prize for discovering penicillin in 1945, and Robert Koch, who was recognized as early as 1905 for his research into tuberculosis.
($1 = 11.1067 Swedish Krona)
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Reporting by Niklas Pollard, Johan Ahlander, Simon Johnson in Stockholm and Natalie Grover in London; additional reporting by Terje Solsvik in Oslo, Anna Ringstrom in Stockholm, Marie Mannes in Gdansk and Kristi Knolle and Riham Alkousaa in Berlin; Adaptation by William Maclean
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