Swedish Geneticist, Svante Paabo has been awarded the 2022 Nobel Price worth $900,000 for Physiology or medicine “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.”
The winner was announced on Monday at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden.
A statement released by the Nobel Prize committee, said “Through his pioneering research, Svante Pääbo — this year’s Nobel Prize laureate in physiology or medicine — accomplished something seemingly impossible: sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans,” the statement read.
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The statement added that Paabo “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.”
The committee said this ground breaking research by Paabo is very important to human evolution because it will help us understand “How our immune system reacts to infections.”
The Nobel Prize is an international award, given to experts in various fields by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden, and based on the fortune of Alfred Nobel, Swedish inventor and entrepreneur.
Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine is one in a series of Nobel prizes that would be awarded starting from today. Other prizes to follow are Literature, Physics and Chemistry.
Since the inception of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or medicine, 113 Nobel Prizes have been awarded between 1901 and 2022.
12 women have been awarded the medicine prize so far. Each prize carries a medal, diploma, and a cash award
