A Swedish paleogeneticist Svante Pääbo, was awarded a Nobel Prize for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution and for the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome and the foundation of paleogenomics.
The Nobel jury explained that, by revealing the differing genetics that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominids, Pääbo’s findings have provided the basis for exploring what makes human unique beings. He discovered the previously unknown hominin, Denisova. He was granted the Nobel prize for his extensive work on Neanderthals DNA.
He concluded among many other things that Covid-19 patients with a snippet of Neanderthal DNA run a higher risk of severe complications from the disease. Svante Pääbo, will receive the prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, Pääbo has been studying ancient DNA since graduate school, when he managed to isolate DNA samples from Egyptian mummies in a German museum.
He created a new discipline paleogenomics. Pääbo is currently the director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and is a professor at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan.
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