Svante Pääbo Wins Nobel Prize in Medicine

Svante Pääbo won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.

“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,” said the Nobel announcement.

In 1999, Pääbo, who born in Sweden, founded the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, where he is still active. He also holds a position as adjunct professor at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, in Japan.