Nobel prize for biology
- The Nobel Prize for Medicine this year will be awarded to Svante Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist of Germany.
- Lone winner of the Medicine or Physiology Prize this year - not witnessed since 2016.
Contribution of Pääbo
- Brought Neanderthals (human-like species) to the centre on the question of human evolution.
- Now known that Europeans and Asians carry anywhere between 1%-4% of Neanderthal DNA.
- A large fraction of humanity will be influenced in terms of propensity to disease and adaptability to conditions by a species that evolved in Africa, but 1,00,000 years earlier.
- Pääbo pioneered and perfected techniques to extract DNA from fossil remains.
- Eventually published the first Neanderthal genome sequence in 2010.
- 2008 - a 40,000-year-old fragment from a finger bone yielded DNA that turned out to be from an entirely new species of hominin called Denisova.
- First time that a new species discovered based on DNA analysis.
- Interbred with humans and 6% of human genomes in parts of South East Asia are of Denisovan ancestry.
Prelims Takeaway
- Neanderthals
- Genomes
- Denisova species