Nobel Prize 2022: Svante Paabo gets physiology or medicine award

NEW DELHI: The Nobel Assembly Karolinska Institute, a medical university in Sweden, has announced the winners of the Nobel Prize 2022 for physiology or medicine. Svante Paabo has received the award for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.

“The 2022 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Svante Pääbo “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution,” Nobel Prize page said in a tweet.

BREAKING NEWS:
The 2022 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Svante Pääbo “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.” pic.twitter.com/fGFYYnCO6J

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 3, 2022

Paabo not only accomplished the sequencing of the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans, he also made the sensational discovery of a previously unknown hominin, Denisova.

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.

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“Humanity has always been intrigued by its origins. 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?,” an official statement from the Nobel Prize website said.

What also made Paabo win was that his seminal research gave rise to a completely new scientific discipline – paleogenomics. By revealing genetic differences that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominins, his discoveries provide the basis for exploring what makes us uniquely human.

Last year, David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian jointly received the Nobel Prize 2021 for medicine or physiology for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch.