Svante Paabo awarded Nobel Prize in medicine

The Nobel Prizes 2022 for medicine or physiology was awarded to Swedish geneticist Svante Paabo. Svante Paabo was given the award “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution,” the Nobel Prize committee. Considered the most prestigious prize in the scientific world, it is awarded by the Nobel Assembly of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and is worth 10 million Swedish crowns.

About Svante Paabo

Born on 20 April 1955,Svante Paabo is a Swedish geneticist specialising in the field of evolutionary genetics. As one of the founders of paleogenetics, he has worked extensively on the Neanderthal genome.He is the founding director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, since 1997.He is also professor at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan.

Awards and honours

In 1992, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honour awarded in German research. Paabo was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2000. In 2005, he received the prestigious Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine.In 2008, Paabo was added to the members of the Order Pour le Merite for Sciences and Arts. In the same year he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.In October 2009, the Foundation For the Future announced that Paabo had been awarded the 2009 Kistler Prize for his work isolating and sequencing ancient DNA, beginning in 1984 with a 2,400-year-old mummy.In June 2010, the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) awarded him the Theodor Bucher Medal for outstanding achievements in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.In 2013, he received Gruber Prize in Genetics for ground breaking research in evolutionary genetics.In June 2015, he was awarded the degree of DSc (honoris causa) at NUI Galway.He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2016, and in 2017, was awarded the Dan David Prize. In 2018, he received the Princess of Asturias Awards in the category of Scientific Research, in 2020 the Japan Prize, in 2021 the Massry Prize and in 2022 the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for sequencing the first Neanderthal genome.