Advisory Board October 3, 2022
Svante Pääbo, a Swedish-born scientist and director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, has won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for “his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.”
A ‘seemingly impossible’ discovery
According to the Nobel Committee, Pääbo “accomplished something seemingly impossible” by sequencing the first Neanderthal genome.
Ancient DNA is often chemically damaged and is present in ancient samples at very low levels, the New York Times reports. It can also easily be mixed up with the DNA of those handling the samples, making it hard to determine which genes are ancient and which are modern.
Pääbo utilized modern DNA sequencing technology and designed labs with high cleanliness standards called...
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