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Updated October 3rd, 2022 at 18:07 IST

From 13-year-old Indiana Jones wannabe to Nobel Prize winner; Know all about Svante Paabo

The Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology 2022 was awarded to Sweden’s Svante Pääbo for his discoveries regarding the 'origins of humanity'.

Reported by: Abhishek Raval
Svante Paabo
IMAGE: AP | Image:self
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Sweden’s Svante Pääbo was conferred The Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology 2022 on October 3 for his discoveries regarding the ‘origins of humanity, Where do we come from, and how are we related to those who came before us? What makes us Homo sapiens, different from other hominins?’ as revealed in his research, sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans. 

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 flow of genes to present-day humans has relevance in terms of how the immune system of contemporary humans reacts to infections. Broadly, Paabo’s discoveries forms the basis for exploring ‘what makes us uniquely humans’.

At 13, Paabo wanted to be like Indiana Jones discovering mummies

Svante Paabo’s fascination with Archeology deepened post his visit to Egypt, when he was 13 years old. He wished to become like Indiana Jones discovering mummies and other ancient hidden treasuries after the Egypt tour, accompanying his mother, who was a Chemist.

Paabo’s father was also a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist - Sune Bergström, whose influence led him to switch his interest from Archeology to medicine. “At that time, if you were in Sweden and interested in basic biological research, you went to medical school,” says Pääbo as quoted by the Gruber Foundation, the Yale University. However, he again moved to Archeology and with the help of his former Egyptology professors, in a bid to extract DNA from archaeological remains, he went to the German museum and attempted to isolate DNA from the remains. In a major achievement, he was able to successfully demonstrate DNA survived in the cell nuclei of some Egyptian mummies.

Paabo was just a student then, in the age when there was no internet - the late evolutionary molecular biologist Allan Wilson at the University of California, Berkeley, who got impressed with Paabo’s work and showed interest in doing a Sabbatical in his Laboratory, however, “It was before the Internet,” laughs Pääbo. “He had no way of knowing that I didn’t have a lab, that I was just a graduate student,” and wrote back whether he can join for a postdoctoral position in Wilson’s lab.

Watershed moment in evolutionary genetics

Paabo began working with Wilson in 1987, where his work involved the discovery - such as the finding that the giant flightless birds - moas, who faced extinction in New Zealand about 500 years ago, are more closely related to Australian emus than to kiwis, the flightless birds that populate New Zealand today.

He returned to Europe in 1990, becoming a professor of general biology at the University of Munich and focussed on the development of techniques to study ancient DNA and started applying them to Neanderthals, humans’ closest extinct relative. Paabo again took the specimens from the german museum and successfully sequenced mtDNA from a Neanderthal upper arm bone, which is considered to be a watershed moment in evolutionary genetics. In 1997, Pääbo became the director of the Department of Genetics at the new Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, a position he continues to hold today.

Image: AP

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Published October 3rd, 2022 at 17:50 IST

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