Posted on 10/03/2022 5:59:09 AM PDT by billorites
This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo for his discoveries on human evolution.
Thomas Perlmann, secretary of the Nobel Committee, announced the winner Monday at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
Pääbo has spearheaded research comparing the genome of modern humans and our closest extinct relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, showing that there was mixing between the species.
The prizes carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (over $1.2 million Cdn) and will be handed out to the winners on Dec. 10. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize's creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.
The medicine prize kicked off a week of Nobel Prize announcements. It continues Tuesday with the physics prize, with chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on Oct. 10. Son of a Nobel winner
While Neanderthal bones were first discovered in the mid-19th century, only by unlocking their DNA — often referred to as the code of life — have scientists been able to fully understand the links between species.
This included the time when modern humans and Neanderthals diverged as a species, determined to be around 800,000 years ago, said Anna Wedell, chair of the Nobel Committee.
"Pääbo and his team also surprisingly found that gene flow had occurred from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens, demonstrating that they had children together during periods of co-existence," she said.
This transfer of genes between hominin species affects how the immune system of modern humans reacts to infections, such as the coronavirus. About one to two per cent of people outside Africa have Neanderthal genes.
Wedell described this as "a sensational discovery" that subsequently showed Neanderthals and Denisovan to be sister groups which split from each other around 600,000 years ago. Denisovan genes have been found in up to 6 per cent of modern humans in Asia and Southeast Asia, indicating that interbreeding occurred there too.
"By mixing with them after migrating out of Africa, homo sapiens picked up sequences that improved their chances to survive in their new environments," said Wedell. For example, Tibetans share a gene with Denisovans that helps them adapt to the high altitude.
Pääbo, 67, performed his prize-winning studies in Germany at the University of Munich and at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Pääbo is the son of Sune Bergstrom, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1982.
>>About one to two per cent of people outside Africa have Neanderthal genes.
Should be “people outside Africa have one to two percent Neanderthal genes.”
Sounds Finnish to me!
Regardless, congratulations!
The literature prize and the peace prize are always ... interesting. As in the literature, have I ever even heard of the winner? And peace? After they gave it to Yasir Arafat it lost all significance.
Who will get the Peace Prize this year? Putin? Xi? Biden? The Iranian leadership? The Squad?
What they mean is that people whose ancestry is 100% sub-Saharan African have no Neanderthal genes. People of sub-Saharan African ancestry outside of Africa often have some European or indigenous American ancestry.
It’s gotta be Zelensky, right?
>>Sounds Finnish to me!
Estonian
Nobel Prize in medicine awarded for research into the evolutionary history of humankind
Pääbo is the third parent-child pair to win a medicine Nobel. His father, Sune Bergström, was awarded the prize for hormone research in 1982.
https://www.statnews.com/2022/10/03/nobel-prize-medicine-physiology-2022/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sune_Bergstr%C3%B6m
In 1943, Bergström married Maj Gernandt.[7] He had two sons, the businessman Rurik Reenstierna, with Maj Gernandt, and the evolutionary geneticist Svante Pääbo (winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine), from an extramarital affair with the Estonian chemist Karin Pääbo. Both sons were born in 1955, and Rurik had learned about existence of Svante only around 2004.[8]
In the past people got the prize for being fanatically opposed to George W. Bush (Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, etc.). So maybe now the criterion will be hostility to Donald Trump. Lynn Cheney may have the inside track for this year's prize.
All arguments against the idea that unmarried mothers should just abort their babies.
+1 to Svante Pääbo!!!!
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