Nobel in Medicine goes to the man who brought us the Neanderthal genome

Enlarge (credit: Karsten Möbius)

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to a single recipient on Monday: Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Pääbo’s work will be familiar to regular readers of these pages, as he was the driving force behind the completion of the Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes, and he has helped us understand how these lineages contributed to the genomes of modern humans. This has more to tell us about physiology and medicine than a casual glance might suggest.

Pääbo’s central role in this story and his intense focus on this topic are likely to allow widespread acceptance of his sole-recipient status, despite the Nobels’ long history of controversy over who gets acknowledged. But Pääbo also benefitted from being lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, when a revolution in DNA sequencing technology provided the capabilities his ideas so sorely needed.

I briefly met Pääbo back in the 1990s when we were both working at Berkeley. He was already interested in old DNA and was working in one of the best labs for that sort of thing, run by the late Allan Wilson. PCR had been commercialized less than a decade earlier, and Wilson’s lab was pushing the limits of the technique as a way of obtaining very old DNA that was a rare component of a sample that might have been in the environment for centuries or more—fragments of egg shells from the extinct moa birds made regular appearances in the lab at the time.