The 2022 award goes to Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo for his pioneering work in the field of human evolution
Svante Pääbo has won the Nobel Prize for medicine for “his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution,” it has been announced. The Nobel Committee said Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist, “accomplished something seemingly impossible” when he sequenced the first neanderthal genome and discovered that Homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals.
“Pääbo’s seminal research gave rise to an entirely new scientific discipline; paleogenomics,” the committee said. “By revealing genetic differences that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominins, his discoveries provide the basis for exploring what makes us uniquely human.” When he first unveiled his findings in 2010, Pääbo said that “having a first version of the Neanderthal genome fulfills a longstanding dream.