Svante Paabo awarded Nobel Prize in medicine 2022

• The Nobel Prizes 2022 for medicine or physiology was awarded to Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo. 

• Svante Paabo was given the award “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution,” the Nobel Prize committee. 

• Considered the most prestigious prize in the scientific world, it is awarded by the Nobel Assembly of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($900,357).

• Through his pioneering research, Svante Pääbo accomplished something seemingly impossible: sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans. 

• He also made the sensational discovery of a previously unknown hominin, Denisova. Importantly, Pääbo also found that gene transfer had occurred from these now extinct hominins to Homo sapiens following the migration out of Africa around 70,000 years ago.

• This ancient flow of genes to present-day humans has physiological relevance today, for example affecting how our immune system reacts to infections.