Bhubaneswar: Svante Pääbo has won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.”
Announcing the winner on Monday at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, the Nobel Prize committee said, “Through his pioneering research, Svante Pääbo accomplished something seemingly impossible: sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans. He also made the sensational discovery of a previously unknown hominin, Denisova.”
“Svante Pääbo’s research gave rise to an entirely new scientific discipline; paleogenomics. 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 statement added.
The award is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($900,357).
Nobel Prizes for physics on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday, Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on October 10.