On Monday morning, Pääbo was just finishing a cup of tea when he got a call from Sweden. “I'm driven by curiosity, by asking the questions, ‘where do we come from,’ and ‘what were the important events in our history that made us who we are?’” Pääbo told Smithsonian magazine’s Steve Olson in 2006. He studied mummies and extinct animals before focusing his efforts on Neanderthals. “Ancient DNA becomes very powerful because it gives you a direct look into the past,” Eske Willerslev, a biologist at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, told NPR’s Christopher Joyce in 2010.Ĭolleagues throw Svante Pääbo into a pool of water after learning he won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.īorn in 1955 in Stockholm, Pääbo spent three decades working to unravel the Neanderthal genome, mostly at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. His work has made it possible for other scientists to pursue ancient DNA studies, opening the door for research that has “totally reconfigured our understanding of human variation and human history,” says David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, to the Associated Press’ Pietro de Cristofaro and Laura Ungar. As Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in her book The Sixth Extinction, the process was like trying to reconstruct a “Manhattan telephone book from pages that have been put through a shredder, mixed with yesterday’s trash, and left to rot in a landfill.” In 2010, after years of painstaking work, Pääbo and his team published the sequenced Neanderthal genome, a feat that at one time was considered impossible, reports the New York Times’ Benjamin Mueller. Over time, very old DNA degrades and can become polluted with the DNA of bacteria, and modern scientists can also easily contaminate it with their own genetic material.īut time and again, Pääbo found ways around these and other issues.

Pääbo, who is 67, has spent decades pioneering and perfecting new methods of extracting Neanderthal DNA, an extremely complex and challenging process. Pääbo’s decades of research have made it possible for scientists to begin probing differences between today’s modern humans and their ancient ancestors. The Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine awarded the field’s top prize on Monday to Svante Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist who determined how to extract and analyze DNA from 40,000-year-old Neanderthal bones.

Svante paabo book