The Nobel Prize in Medicine 2022 was awarded to the Swedish biologist Svante Pääbo "for his discoveries on the genomes of extinct hominids and human evolution".
Through his pioneering research, explain from the Karolinska Institute, the biologist has achieved something apparently impossible: to sequence the genome of the Neanderthal , an extinct relative of today's humans. By recovering the DNA of primitive men and reconstructing it despite the age and the damage suffered, Pääbo was able to build a family tree of our ancestors , completing it thanks to the archaeological remains.
It is important to underline - they still explain from the Nobel Prize - that Pääbo also discovered that the gene transfer had occurred from these now extinct hominids to Homo sapiens following the migrations from Africa, about 70,000 years ago. This ancient flow of genes to humans today has physiological relevance today, for example by influencing the way our immune system reacts to infections .
Pääbo's research gave rise to an entirely new scientific discipline, paleogenomics . By revealing the genetic differences that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominids, his findings provide the basis for exploring what makes us "typically" human.
WHO IS - Born in Stockholm on April 20, 1955, Svante Pääbo studied at the University of Uppsala and later 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. , including the Max Delbrück medal, the Theodor Bücher medal (Febs), the Louis-Jeantet prize (Geneva), and the Japan Prize (Tokyo).
