The Swedish Svante Pääbo was awarded for his contribution to health from his study of human evolution.
Sweden’s Svante Pääbo is the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, Sweden’s Karolinska Institute announced on Monday.
According to the institute, Pääbo, who is 67 years old, receives the important award “for his discoveries on the genomes of extinct hominids and human evolution.”
The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine initiates the week of announcements of the Nobel prizes. This Friday the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced.
According to the members of the committee that awards the prize, “Svante Pääbo has established a completely new scientific discipline, paleogenomics.”
According to the committee that awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Svante Pääbo has succeeded in creating an entirely new discipline: paleogenomics.
They add: “By revealing the genetic differences that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominins, their discoveries provide the basis for exploring what makes us uniquely human.”
During the presentation made following the announcement, it was highlighted that the Swedish geneticist also made the discovery of an extinct hominin, the Denisova, what achievement from genome data recovered from a small finger bone sample.
It is also important for the committee to note that Pääbo uncovered the fact that gene transfer from these now-extinct hominids to Homo sapiens had occurred following the out-of-Africa migration around 70,000 years ago.
According to the studies of the new awardee, “this ancient flow of genes for current humans has physiological relevance today, for example, by affecting the way our immune systems react to infections.”
Since 1997 Pääbo has been the head of the Genetics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
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