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| Photo Credit: AP. |
STOCKHOLM (AP) — Swedish scientist Svante Paabo won the Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for his discoveries on human evolution that provided key insights into our immune system and what makes us unique compared with our extinct cousins, the award’s panel said.
Paabo has
spearheaded the development of new techniques that allowed researchers to
compare the genome of modern humans and that of other hominins — the
Neanderthals and Denisovans.
While
Neanderthal bones were first discovered in the mid-19th century, only by
unlocking their DNA — often referred to as the code of life — have scientists
been able to fully understand the links between species.
This
included the time when modern humans and Neanderthals diverged as a species,
determined to be around 800,000 years ago, said Anna Wedell, chair of the Nobel
Committee.
“Paabo and
his team also surprisingly found that gene flow had occurred from Neanderthals
to Homo sapiens, demonstrating that they had children together during periods
of co-existence,” she said.
This
transfer of genes between hominin species affects how the immune system of
modern humans reacts to infections, such as the coronavirus. About 1-2% of
people outside Africa have Neanderthal genes.
“Svante Pääbo has discovered the genetic make
up of our closest relatives, the Neanderthals and the Denison hominins,”
Nils-Göran Larsson, a Nobel Assembly member, told the Associated Press after
the announcement. “And the small differences between these extinct human forms
and us as humans today will provide important insight into our body functions
and how our brain has developed and so forth.”
Paabo, 67,
performed his prizewinning studies in Germany at the University of Munich and
at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Paabo is
the son of Sune Bergstrom, who won the Nobel prize in medicine in 1982.
According to the Nobel Foundation, it’s the eighth time that the son or
daughter of a Nobel laureate also won a Nobel Prize. Only once has a father-son
duo shared the same Nobel Prize: in 1915 when Sir William Henry Bragg and his
son William Laurence Bragg won the physics award together.
Scientists
in the field lauded the Nobel Committee’s choice this year.
David Reich,
a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, said he was thrilled the group honored
the field of ancient DNA, which he worried might “fall between the cracks.”
By
recognizing that DNA can be preserved for tens of thousands of years — and
developing ways to extract it — Paabo and his team created a completely new way
to answer questions about our past, Reich said. That work was the basis for an
“explosive growth” of ancient DNA studies in recent decades.
“It’s totally reconfigured our understanding
of human variation and human history,” Reich said, adding that Paabo “was, more
than anyone, the pioneer of this field.”
The medicine
prize kicked off a week of Nobel Prize announcements. It continues Tuesday with
the physics prize, with chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The
2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on
Oct. 10.
Last year’s
medicine recipients were David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their
discoveries into how the human body perceives temperature and touch.
The prizes
carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) and will be
handed out on Dec. 10. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s
creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.
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AP stories about the Nobel Prizes at https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes