The Press Stories
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This year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine rewards the work of Swedish biologist Svante Pabo, who has worked for years to understand the evolutionary history of humans and the genomes of prehistoric humans.
” By revealing the divergent genetics that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominids, his discoveries have provided the basis for exploring what makes us humans such unique beings. “, congratulated the jury of the Nobel Prize.
The work of Svante Babo concerned the sequencing of the Neanderthal human genome. They postulated that Neanderthals mixed their genes with sapiens. The discovery of interbreeding between sapiens and Neanderthals dates back to 2009. This transfer of genes, on the order of 2%, has a physiological impact and helps us understand how our immune system responds to infections.
This is not the first time that Svante Pääbo’s research has been rewarded. In 2018, he received another prestigious award, the Gorber European Science Prize, in Hamburg.
Svante Pääbo, 67 years old, born in Stockholm, lives in Germany. Along with the Nobel Prize in Medicine, he also received 10 million crowns.
His father, Sune Bergstrom, also received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1982.
