Sweden's Paabo wins Nobel Prize in medicine

STOCKHOLM - Swedish geneticist Svante Paabo won the 2022 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his discoveries"concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution", the award-giving body said on Monday.

"By revealing genetic differences that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominins,his discoveries provide the basis for exploring what makes us uniquely human", the Nobel committee said.

Paabo found that gene transfer had occurred from these now extinct hominins to Homo sapiens.

"This ancient flow of genes to present-day humans has physiological relevance today, for example affecting how our immune system reacts to infections," the jury said.

The prize, arguably among the most prestigious in the scientific world, is awarded by the Nobel Assembly of Sweden's Karolinska Institute and is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($900,357).

It is the first of this year's batch of prizes.

"He was overwhelmed, he was speechless.Very happy,"said Thomas Perlmann, secretary for the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, who called Paabo with the news.

Paabo, son of the Nobel Prizewinning biochemist Sune Bergstrom, has been credited with transforming the study of human origins after developing approaches to allow for the examination of DNA sequences from archaeological and paleontological remains.

Key achievements

His key achievements include sequencing an entire Neanderthal genome to reveal the link between extinct people and modern humans. He also brought to light the existence of a previously unknown human species called the Denisovans, from a 40,000-year-old fragment of a finger bone discovered in Siberia.

Created in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and wealthy businessman Alfred Nobel, the prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace have been awarded since 1901. The economics prize is a later addition.

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed medical research center stage with many expecting that the development of the vaccines that have allowed the world to regain some sense of normality may eventually be rewarded.

Still, it typically takes many years for any given research to be honored, with the committees charged with picking the winners looking to determine its full value.

This year's festivities were expected to mark the return of the Nobel banquet in Stockholm after a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic.

Past winners in the field include a string of famous researchers, notably Alexander Fleming, who shared the 1945 prize for the discovery of penicillin, and Robert Koch, who won in 1905 for his investigations into tuberculosis.

Agencies via Xinhua