Medscape October 3, 2022
The Nobel Committee announced today it was awarding Professor Svante Pääbo the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2022 for his “pioneering research” into ancient DNA.
It all started with a 40,000-year-old bone. That Neanderthal bone contained enough DNA that Pääbo could start decades of research showing us modern humans, Homo sapiens, are genetically distinct from other now-extinct hominins such as Neanderthals and Denisovans.
The connection to physiology and medicine comes from the genes some modern humans carry from these ancient relatives. For example, Neanderthal genes transferred to Homo sapiens can explain how our immune systems react to different infections. Pääbo also discovered that a copy of a gene from another extinct relative, the Denisovans, gives modern-day Tibetans a...
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