How Max Planck Institute welcomes its Nobel laureate

19:07   5 October, 2022

The Max Planck Society's Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology published a tweet the day before about how the institute welcomed it Nobel Prize winner in medicine and physiology, Svante Paabo, this morning.

Photographer Tim Boddy posted photos on his page of a party thrown by colleagues in honor of the newly minted laureate. Judging from the photos, Paabo was bathed in the river right in his clothes.

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Paabo received the Nobel Prize for his discoveries on the genome of extinct hominids (the family of primates that includes homo sapiens) and human evolution.

Through his research, Paabo was able to accomplish what seemed impossible in the scientific world - sequencing the Neanderthal genome. He also made a sensational discovery of a previously unknown hominid - Denisovskii man.

Swedish biologist also discovered that gene transfer from extinct hominids to homo sapiens occurred after their migration from Africa 70,000 years ago. In modern humans, these genes determine how their immune system responds to infections. Paabo's research spawned an entirely new scientific discipline: paleogenomics.

Svante Paabo is a specialist in evolutionary genetics. His father, the biochemist Sune Bergström, shared the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Bengt Samuelson and John Wayne.

Paabo was born in Stockholm in 1955. From 1975, he studied Egyptology, Russian language, history of science and medicine at Uppsala University, and in 1986 he completed his thesis on molecular immunology. He worked in the center of molecular biology at the University of Zurich and the Institute for Cancer Research in London, from 1987 to 1990 at the University of California at Berkeley he isolated the genetic material of fossils and recently extinct animals. From 1990 to 1997 he was Professor of General Biology at the University of Munich and since 1997 he has been Director of the Genetics Department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.



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