"I received a call from Sweden , and of course I thought it was related to our small summer villa in Sweden. I thought, oh, is lawnmower broken or something?" In an interview call from Adam Smith, chief scientific officer of the Nobel Prize Promotion Department, Pabo said.
Beijing time on October 3, 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo (Svante Pääbo), commending his discovery of the extinct genome and human evolution .
Figure | Svante Pääbo (Source: Data Picture)
Pääbo was born on April 20, 1955 in Stockholm, Sweden. He grew up with his mother Karin Pääbo, a chemist. His father was biochemist Sune Bergström and won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
When asked about the impact of his parents on him, Pabo said that the mother who grew up with him was the person who had the greatest influence on him. He said: "In a sense, it made me a little sad that she could not go through this day. She loved science very much and has inspired and encouraged me for many years. I had some connection with my father, and he was very interested in my work, but I was not as close to him as my mother."
Pab was very interested in Ancient Egyptian science since he was a child, and he had many questions he wanted to explore. For example, do people living in Egypt have kinship with the ancient Egyptian pharaohs ?
One day he was studying at Uppsala University in Sweden, he took a train to the East German Museum, which collected many ancient Egyptian mummies. Later, he successfully used DNA cloning technology to extract DNA from an mummy that had been preserved for more than two thousand years and complete sequencing. The result was published in a journal published by the East German Academy of Sciences, but it did not stir up waves because few people read it.
Parbo studied human immunology at Upsala University, but this is not his interest. So, at the invitation of Professor Allan Wilson from the University of California, Berkeley, Parbo, who obtained his doctorate, joined the former's laboratory and began his postdoctoral research. This has also become an important turning point in his life.
mentioned his research, and Pabo said: "This is a step-by-step process that began in the 1980s. I have been trying to extract a little DNA from the only things... starting with dry tissues. You know, these tissues are only a few months old."
Just now, Pabo has studied some extinct animals, such as mammoth , thyrol , etc. He used polymerase chain reaction (PCR, Polymerase Chain Reaction) technology to extract their DNA and then analyze it.
"Later, I got a job in Germany. Of course, Neanderthal is a big existence in people's imagination. So, in a sense, this is the obvious next step."
Since then, Parbo has begun to focus on the research on human evolution.
Neanderthals are a type of late Homo sapiens , and are also a representative group in the middle stage of human evolutionary history. In 1856, its fossils were found in the Neanderthal valley in Germany. After solving many difficulties and challenges, Pabo published a paper on Cell, and published the sequencing results of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA. This is the first time scientists have measured the DNA sequence of an extinct human being. In May 2010, Parbo published a draft Neanderthal genome sequence on Science.This is the first whole genome sequencing about Neanderthals, with the highest accuracy of 50 layers, comparable to the sequencing of the current human genome.
With this result, he further discovered that Neanderthals had gene exchange with Homo sapiens migrating from Africa . Some of the genes are currently present in modern people living outside Africa.
In 2014, a book written by Parbo and named after "Neanderthal: Finding the Lost Genome" was officially published and was quickly translated into 16 languages. In the book, he tells the entire research process of Neanderthals from a private perspective. It is reported that his original intention of writing this book was to be more interesting and to let his children understand it when they grow up. He once said: "That way they know what their dad was doing when he was not at home."
Denisovan (Denisovan), a race that once lived in the last ice age but was extinct. In 2008, a fragment of a phalanx from 40,000 years ago was found in the Denisova Cave in the south of Siberia. The DNA in this bone is well preserved.
So, Pabo led the team to carry out corresponding sequencing work. The project was led by Johannes Krause, and Fu Qiaomei , who is currently the director of the Molecular Paleontology Laboratory of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is responsible for extracting DNA and completing sequencing.
In March 2010, the team published a DNA analysis report on the above-mentioned finger bones. The report shows that the DNA sequence is different from the known Neanderthals and today's humans, which is an ancient human that was previously unknown and unique. They named it the Denisovans. The successful sequencing of Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes by
not only made Prabol a world-famous star scientist, but even paleogenomics, a very unpopular discipline, has become a new popular field in anthropology, research.
Parbo has previously won many awards and honors, including the Leibniz Prize, the Gruber Genetics Prize, the Colber European Science Prize, etc. However, regarding the Nobel Prize of , he said: "I have won several awards before, but somehow, I don't think I am really qualified to win the Nobel Prize of ."
Now, Pabo, who is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, continues to carry out human evolution research, and has also shifted his work to the study of human uniqueness. He wanted to explore why only modern Homo sapiens can stand out from so many races, quickly expand to the whole world, and accumulate technology and civilization.
And his contribution to the early ancient human genes will also help us modern humans to see their place in the world of life in a completely different way.
"Sometimes it's interesting to think about it. If the Neanderthals lived another 40,000 years, what would that impact on us?" he said.
Reference:
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2022/paabo/interview/
