The 2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded exclusively to 67-year-old Swede Svante Paabo, for his discoveries on the hominid genome. Born on April 20, 1955 in Stockholm, Paabo can be considered a sort of DNA archaeologist. He has, in fact, opened a new field of research, paleogenomics.
Pääbo is credited with having tackled one of the greatest scientific challenges at the same time with new weapons. It was in fact the first to bring genetics into a field such as paleontology, which until then had been based on the study of fossils or very ancient artifacts. Thanks to new genetic technologies, Pääbo was among the pioneers of the extraction of DNA from fossils and of its analysis. The research he coordinated has shed new light on human evolution, to the point of completely revolutionizing its study.
For example, we owe to him the analysis of the Neanderthal DNAwhich revealed that Homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals and that some genes of those human cousins are still present in the genome of almost all contemporary populations.
Also to his research we owe the discovery of an ancient human population, the Denisovans, also crossed with Homo sapiens about 70,000 years ago: the starting point to reconstruct its history was a fragment of a bone found in a cave in the Altai Mountains.
The scientific career
After studying at Uppsala University, Pääbo, he moved first to the University of Zurich, then to the American University of Berkeley and later to the German University of Munich. In 1999 he founded the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, where he currently works. He is also a lecturer in Japan, at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and is part of prestigious academies, such as the Royal Society, the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. , the French Academy of Sciences. the Leopoldina one and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.
Numerous international awards, including the Max Delbrück medal, the Theodor Bücher medal (Febs), the Louis-Jeantet prize (Geneva), and the Japan Prize (Tokyo).
A portrait of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, Svante Paabo, by Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach
The Nobel Prize 40 years after the one to his father Bergstrom
The new winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, Svante Pääbo, is in turn the son of another Nobel Prize for Medicine: his father, the biochemist Sune Karl Bergstrom, was in fact awarded the same award exactly 40 years ago, in 1982, for his studies on prostaglandins (together with Bengt I. Samuelsson and John R. Vane). Svante Paabo does not bear the surname of his father, but that of his mother (the Estonian chemist Karin Paabo), because it is the result of an extramarital relationship.
Lincei, ‘well deserved’ award
The Nobel Prize for Medicine goes to the founder of paleogenetics, the Swedish Svante Pääbo: this is the comment of the president of the Accademia dei Lincei, Roberto Antonelli, and of the vice president Giorgio Parisi to the recognition, which for two consecutive years is awarded to a member of the Academy. Last year, in fact, Parisi was awarded for Physics.
“A well-deserved Nobel Prize to a great scientist who we have the honor of having him as a foreign member of the Accademia dei Lincei”, say Antonelli and Parisi. “The reconstruction of ancient genomes – they add – was a fascinating adventure, which allowed us to reconstruct the history of humanity and relationships with our extinct brothers, the Neanderthals and the Denisovans”.
Manzi, from the studies of Pääbo light on extinct species
They have brought to light extinct species and at the same time they are allowing us to understand how modern man is susceptible or not to contract diseases, such as Covid-19: these are the two great merits of Svante Pääbo’s research awarded today with the Nobel Prize for Medicine, according to the paleoanthropologist Giorgio Manzi, of the Sapienza University of Rome and academic of the Lincei.
The Nobel Prize “was a nice surprise for those involved in the biology of human evolution: it is a relatively small scientific community, but it really interests everyone because it has to do with our biological nature,” Manzi told ANSA. Paleogenetics is a relatively recent field: “the first discovery dates back to 25 years ago, since then it has made us make extraordinary progress and we will continue to do so”.
In 1997, Pääbo’s research “introduced us to the DNA of Neanderthals in 1997 and less than 10 years later almost the entire genome of this extinct species; later, they led us to discover hybridizations and crosses that have meant that in our genome still conserves shreds of Neanderhal DNA “. Another step forward, added Manzi, in 2010, with the discovery of Denisova’s man starting from a small fragment of bone discovered in the Altai Mountains: “a new world was opened when it was discovered that in those parts there were only Neanderthals and Sapiens, but there was a third population never identified in the fossils “, the Denisovans. The discovery is so recent that “this extinct species does not yet have a name in Latin”.
For Manzi “the most formidable of these discoveries is also one of the most recent, when a hybrid between Neanderthal and Denisovani was discovered in Pääbo’s laboratory”. According to the expert, “beyond the niche sector of evolutionary biology and human evolution, the discoveries extend to the field of biology and medicine: we know better who we are and through advanced techniques we are able to look better into our genome and understand the possible consequences on health, as happened in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. It has been discovered that the Neanderthal DNA present in our genome can have positive and negative effects on the possibility or not of contracting the disease “. For this reason, according to Manzi, the one in Pääbo “is a prize for biomedicine”. It is a story that has just begun, he concluded, and in the future it could lead both to “learning more and more about human evolution, and perhaps to discovering other extinct species”, as well as to new consequences for biology and medicine.