Monday, 3 October 2022

Swedish-Estonian Svante Pääbo wins Nobel Prize in Medicine

The 2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Svante Pääbo, a geneticist of Estonian origin. Svante Pääbo was the first scientist to successfully clone DNA from a mummy, and in 2009, he completed sequencing the complete genome of a Neanderthal for the first time. His work has established an entirely new scientific discipline, paleogenomics. By revealing genetic differences that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominins, Pääbo's discoveries provide the basis for exploring what makes us uniquely human. 


Pääbo's father, Sune Bergström, won the Nobel Prize in 1982 for his research on prostaglandins. This is the 8th time the prize has been awarded to the child of a previous winner.


Further reading can be found here