67-year-old Swedish geneticist Svante Pebbo, pioneer of paleogenomics, was awarded the prize Nobel Medicine and Physiology 2022 for the complete sequencing of the Neanderthal genome announced the award committee. The prize is awarded by the Nobel Committee of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and amounts to 10 million Swedish kronor (approximately 920,000 euros).

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2022 #Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Svante Paabo “for discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution”. pic.twitter.com/fGFYYnCO6J

— Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 3, 2022

“He was in shock, he was speechless. Very happy,” said Thomas Perlman, secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, who informed the Swedish geneticist of the award. “He asked me if he could tell anyone and he asked if he could tell his wife and I said he could. He was incredibly excited about this award,” he added.

Pibo, the son of Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Suna Bergström, is credited with transforming the study of human origins after developing approaches to examine DNA sequences from archaeological and paleontological remains.

After living for several decades in Germany, in 2009 he discovered that there was a 2% gene transfer between these now-extinct hominins and Homo Sapiens. This ancient gene flow in modern humans has had an impact on physiology, such as how our immune systems respond to infections.

“The genetic differences between Homo sapiens and our closest relatives, which do not exist today, were not known until they were revealed through the work of Peebault,” the Nobel Committee said in its decision.

He also revealed the existence of a previously unknown human species (Denisovian) from a 40,000-year-old finger bone fragment found in Siberia. His most cited article in Web of Science (4077) was published in 1989.

Prize announcements continue tomorrow Tuesday in Stockholm with the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physics and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday before the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday and the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, the only one to be awarded in Oslo. The Nobel Prize in Economics will be announced next Monday.

This year, the 113th Nobel Prize in Medicine has been awarded to 226 people since its inception, including 12 women. Last year, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Americans Ardem Pataputian and David Julius for discovering how the nervous system perceives temperature and touch.

^{According to REUTERS, AFP}