2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded to Swante PaboUnlike many former Nobel Laureates in Medicine, Dr. Pabo has never actually invented any particular drug or class of drugs. Instead, the award was awarded “for his discoveries on the extinct human genome and human evolution.”This Press release From the Nobel website provides some insight, but why research on three hominids (modern Homo sapiens) [i.e., us], Neanderthals and Denisovans) deserve the Nobel Prize in Medicine.One Quillette’s story explain:
As an immunology graduate student in the early 1980s, the young Swede was 23 Egyptian mummies, one of which — a 2,400-year-old child specimen — was shown to contain cloneable DNA.Find produce First scientific paper on the subject of DNA extraction from fossil tissue.
The technology available at the time did not allow Pääbo to sequence the mummy’s entire genome, nor the Neanderthal specimens he later studied. It wasn’t until 2014 — after 20 years of research — that Pääbo and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology had deciphered the Neanderthal genome so much that it could be systematically compared to that of modern humans. Compare. In the process, they pioneered laboratory and computational solutions to fundamental problems in paleontology: Over tens of thousands of years, the DNA contained in bones typically dissolves into tiny fragments. Any scientist seeking to reconstruct ancient genomes must not only piece together countless isolated fragments, but also apply analytical methods to filter out contaminating DNA from thousands of years’ worth of bone-colonizing fungi and microbes.
Until Pabo proved otherwise, some scientists thought Neanderthals might be our own ancestors. However, Pabo determined that Neanderthals and modern humans developed in parallel — the former in Europe and Asia, the latter in Africa — and their most recent common ancestor lived around 800,000 years ago.
While the technological achievements here are impressive, perhaps the biggest insight is the discovery of a new group of early humans called Denisovans.The Denisovan discovery is described in a 2010 article below nature:
It represents a hitherto unknown human mtDNA that shares a common ancestor with anatomically modern humans and Neanderthal mtDNA about 1 million years ago. This suggests that it originated from a hominin that migrated out of Africa, unlike the ancestors of Neanderthals and modern humans. The stratigraphy of the cave where the bones were found suggests that Denisovans lived very close in time and space to Neanderthals as well as modern humans.
In parts of Europe and Asia, Neanderthal DNA accounts for up to 4 percent of modern human DNA, while in parts of Papua New Guinea and Melanesia, Denisovan DNA is thought to account for up to 4 percent of modern human DNA. Up to 6% of DNA.
Therefore, Dr. Pääbo’s discoveries about human DNA may be crucial if we want to understand modern human DNA.
