October 3, 2022 20:16
Swedish geneticist Svante Papau won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for discoveries that advance understanding of how humans evolved from extinct ancestors.
The prize committee said Papau, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, won it for “discoveries relating to the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution”.
In an audio recording posted on the Nobel website when asked if he expected to win the prize, Babu, 67, said: “No, I’ve received two prizes before, but somehow I didn’t think this (research work) would qualify for a prize. Nobel”.
Babu, the son of a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, is credited with transforming the study of human origins following developing methods to allow examination of DNA sequences from archaeological remains and fossils from the dawn of human history.
Babu helped reveal the existence of a previously unknown human species, Denisovans, from a 40,000-year-old finger bone fragment found in Siberia. But his greatest achievement was the methods developed to allow the entire Neanderthal genome to be sequenced.
This research, which showed that certain genes of Neanderthal origin are preserved in the genomes of today’s humans, was once considered impossible because over thousands of years Neanderthal DNA had shrunk into short pieces that had to be assembled like a giant puzzle, which is also heavily contaminated with DNA. microbial.
“The flow of ancient genes into today’s humans is of physiological importance today, as for example it affects how our immune system reacts to infection,” the Nobel committee said in a statement on Monday.
Babu was born in Stockholm and studied medicine and biochemistry at Uppsala University before creating a scientific discipline called “palaeogenetics” that helped shed light on the genetic differences that distinguish living humans from extinct hominins.
Source: agencies
