Nobel Prize in Medicine 2022
Source: Indian Express
GS III: Science and Technology
What is discussed under Nobel Prize in Medicine 2022?
- About Svante Paabo
- About his research
Why in News?
- Svante Paabo, a Swedish scientist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2022 for his discoveries ‘concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution’.
- The announcement for the 2022 Nobel prize in Medicine was made by a panel at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
About Svante Paabo
- Svante Paabo was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1955.
- He is the current director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.
- Paabo is the son of Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Sune Bergström, who won the Nobel prize in medicine in 1982.
- Sune K. Bergström was a Swedish scientist who shared the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with fellow Swede Bengt Ingemar Samuelsson and Englishman John Robert Vane.
- All three were recognised for their work on prostaglandins, which are biological molecules that impact blood pressure, body temperature, allergic responses, and other physiological phenomena in animals.
- Bergström was the first to show that such compounds exist and to establish the elemental compositions of two of them.
About his research
- Paabo is recognised for changing the study of human origins by establishing methods for examining DNA sequences from archaeological and paleontological remains.
Image by Florian Pircher from Pixabay - He revealed important details about our immune system and what distinguishes us from our extinct relatives.
- His most notable accomplishments include:
- The decoding of a full Neanderthal genome, which revealed the relationship between extinct people and current humans.
- Found the Denisovans, a previously unknown human race, from a 40,000-year-old piece of a finger bone recovered in Siberia.
- Paabo also discovered gene transmission from these now-extinct hominins to Homo sapiens after their journey out of Africa some 70,000 years ago.
- This old gene flow to modern humans has physiological implications, such as influencing how our immune system responds to illnesses.
- Paabo’s breakthrough findings spawned an entirely new scientific discipline: paleogenomics.
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