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From - The Nobel Prize & Wikipedia, Edited by Vinuri Randhula Silva, Svante Pääbo   (born 20 April 1955) is a Swedish  geneticist  specialising in the field of  evolutionary genetics . As one of the founders of  paleogenetics , he has worked extensively on the  Neanderthal genome . He was appointed the director of the Department of Genetics at the  Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology  in  Leipzig, Germany , in 1997. He is also professor at  Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology , Japan. In 2022, he was awarded the  Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine  "for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution" Pääbo was born in  Stockholm  and grew up with his mother,  Estonian  chemist Karin Pääbo. His father was biochemist  Sune Bergström , who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with  Bengt I. Samuelsson  and  John R. Vane  in 1982. Pääbo has via his father one brother, Rurik Reenstierna, who was also bor

    From - The Noble Prize 2022,    Edited by Amal Udawatta, Svante Pääbo – awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine – became fascinated by the possibility of utilising modern genetic methods to study the DNA of Neanderthals. However, he soon realised the extreme technical challenges, because with time DNA becomes chemically modified and degrades into short fragments. As a postdoctoral student with Allan Wilson, a pioneer in the field of evolutionary biology, Pääbo started to develop methods to study DNA from Neanderthals, an endeavour that lasted several decades. In 1990, Pääbo was recruited to University of Munich, where, as a newly appointed Professor, he continued his work on archaic DNA. He decided to analyse DNA from Neanderthal mitochondria – organelles in cells that contain their own DNA. The mitochondrial genome is small and contains only a fraction of the genetic information in the cell, but it is present in thousands of copies, increasing the chance of success.