Rockville, Md. (October 3, 2022)—The American Physiological Society (APS) congratulates geneticist Svante Pääbo, PhD, recipient of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He was awarded this highest honor “for something seemingly impossible: sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans,” the Nobel Assembly wrote in a statement.
Pääbo is director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and is an honorary research fellow at the Natural History Museum in London. His research led to the development of the scientific discipline of paleogenomics.
“In Dr. Pääbo’s hands, the careful use of genomics allowed him to assess human ancestry from genetic fragments retrieved from bone specimens of now extinct hominins that populated the world more than 40,000 years ago. Creating a genomic map from such old and fragmented DNA was not only a tour de force, but it also identified the landmark findings that modern humans and Neanderthals as well as Denisovans—a third distinct hominin—cohabitated and interbred during a period of time. His research also showed that unique genetic mutations distinguish the modern human apart from more ancient human forms,” David Gutterman, PhD, FAPS, chair; and Wolfgang Kübler, PhD, FAPS, chair-elect of the APS Publications Committee, said in a statement.
“Differential genetic expression patterns may be linked to heritable traits, as demonstrated by Dr. Pääbo and colleagues in work published in Physiological Genomics in 2013. While similar links from genomics to physiology are infinitely more complex in ancestral humans, genomic analysis has already suggested a Neanderthal origin of genes that promote diabetes mellitus, inflammatory bowel disease and immune regulation. Future analysis may ultimately help us to better understand who we are and what sets us apart,” Gutterman and Kübler added.
“The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine celebrates the critical role of physiology in understanding life and health. Svante Pääbo’s groundbreaking research into the genome of our ancient human ancestors has clear throughlines to the work many researchers are conducting today. Congratulations to Dr. Pääbo for this recognition,” said APS Executive Director Scott Steen, CAE, FASAE.
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