He tastes like a joke: Svante Pääbo’s colleagues gave him a forced bath to celebrate his Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology… which he took with good grace.
What better way to celebrate your #NobelPrize than being grabbed by your colleagues & thrown into your Institute’s pond?????At #MedicineNobelPrize Winner Svante Pääbo’s @MPI_EVA_Leipzigscientific success is traditionally celebrated w/ a quick *voluntary* bath!????????@maxplanckpress pic.twitter.com/IMnMgPsexx
— Max Planck Society (@maxplanckpress) October 4, 2022
Others around the world have paid tribute to him in a less schoolboy and admiring way. Here are these testimonials collected by Science and Future :
Jean-Jacques Hublin, paleoanthropologist, professor at the Collège de France and at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany)
“I heard the news yesterday while I was flying over the pole between Tokyo and Paris. This is a long-awaited and well-deserved reward. I rejoice in this as a paleoanthropologist and as a friend.
Svante Pääbo is the father of paleogenetics, a new discipline that over the past twenty years has revolutionized the study of human evolution by providing access to the genome of extinct forms of humanity, such as Neanderthals. With his team from Leipzig, Svante Pääbo was the first to sequence the complete genome of this archaic form of man. The technique also allowed the discovery of a new group of fossil hominins hitherto unknown: the Denisovans who populated Asia when the Neanderthals evolved in Europe. Today’s paleoanthropology can integrate the study of anatomy, genes, and behavior that was inconceivable a generation ago.
Svante is a visionary scientist and a great leader. He was instrumental in establishing the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. The worldwide success of this research institute (our success!) owes a lot to his personality”.
Laurent Nguyen, neuroscientist at the University of Liège (Belgium)
“The 2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology recognizes the scientific success of Dr. Svante Pääbo who, over the years, has developed new techniques for analyzing ancient DNA. He founded a paleogenetic research center in Leipzig (Max-Planck for Evolutionary Anthropology), perfectly equipped to study ancient DNA, in particular to avoid contamination with “modern” DNA. He is one of the founding fathers of paleogenomics and he identified new extinct human taxa (Neanderthal and denisova) and he decoded the Neanderthal genome from fossil bones. He thus demonstrated the existence of interbreeding since the genome of modern humans (Eurasian in particular) has more or less 2% of genomic material of Neanderthal origin. (we speak of “introgression” in this regard, editor’s note). Dr Pääbo is an exceptional mentor and a fascinating speaker, as during the conference he gave at Wiston house in Sussex in 2018, where we were all the two speakers.
His work has made it possible to consider the physiological impact of Neanderthal genetic variants in modern humans through the combination of biological tools, such as animal transgenesis and human organoids. Two publications recents to which he made a major contribution demonstrate, for example, that specific genetic changes aimed at restoring the “ancestral” form of certain genes have significant consequences for the construction of the human brain.. His work sheds light on the evolutionary stages through which man has passed and will probably allow us to better understand those with which man will be confronted in the future. This Nobel Prize is well deserved and hailed by all of its employees..”
Alysson R. Muotri, University of San Diego School of Medicine (California)
The American is working on understanding autism, in particular by comparing neanderthal brains with those of modern humans.
“It is a well-deserved recognition. His work opens the way to understanding the origins of several human diseases and adaptations. Personally, this influenced my own research on identifying selected genetic variants positively who created the modern human brain and mind”.
