Svante Pääbo wins 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Svante Pääbo has been awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for “his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution”. The Nobel Assembly announced the news on October 3. 

Well-deserved recognition

Professor Christopher Henshilwood, Director of the SapienCE Centre of Excellence on Early Human Behaviour at the University of Bergen has for some time collaborated with Pääbo and his group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He comments:

“Warm congratulations to Svante Pääbo. We are extremely proud of our collaboration with the new laurate. This is a well-deserved recognition of truly pioneering research. Pääbo´s work has revolutionized our understanding of our human ancestry and how our species, and other hominin species, evolved and co-existed. The work also has major implications for our understanding of human health, Henshilwood says.”

The Swedish-born Pääbo, known for his work on sequencing DNA from ancient humans and our extinct cousins, Neanderthals and Denisovans, was credited by the Nobel announcement for establishing a new scientific discipline, palaeogenomics.

Rewarding collaboration

Professor Henshilwood also had the pleasure of working with the new laureate Svante Pääbo and his group as recently as in 2021.

“We published a joint paper in PNAS, also with other SapienCE scientists Chris Miller and Sarah Wurz. It was very rewarding and insightful working with Pääbo and his fellow scientist Matthias Meyer at the Max Plank laboratory. We have good hopes that there will be continued collaboration with them in the years to come,” Henshilwood says.