Neanderthal DNA project wins Nobel Prize

The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet on Monday awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology to Svante Pääbo for his work in researching the history of the human genome from Neanderthals to modern-day people. Anna Wedell, chair of the Nobel Committee, said that Pääbo and his team had discovered that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens had children with each other during “periods of coexistence.” The research looked at how genetic makeup affects the human immune system.

Who is Svante Pääbo? Pääbo, 67, is a Swedish geneticist. He performed his prize-winning studies in Germany at the University of Munich and at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He is the son of Sune Bergstrom, a Swedish biochemist who won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology. It’s the eighth time a son or daughter of a Nobel laureate has won a Nobel Prize, according to the Nobel Foundation.

Dig deeper: Read Michael Behe’s essay on how elegant molecular machines at the center of life cast doubt on Darwin’s theory of evolution.