This morning, Svante Pääbo was awarded the NobelPrize in medicine. The Swedish geneticist has made stunning discoveries about our forebear species by analysing ancient DNA
The early years of ancient DNA research in the 1980s and 1990s — led by Pääbo and other scientists — was plagued by concerns over contamination from modern human DNA . But methods developed in Pääbo’s lab, and the advent of new sequencing technologies, means that contamination is no longer the ‘bogeyman’ it once was.
“When I started, we weren't even sure you could work with ancient human DNA,” says Pontus Skoglund, a palaeogeneticst at the Francis Crick Institute in London. “But now, and I think led by Svante’s department, we have an approach where contamination is really not a major issue anymore.”Pääbo’s work eking out DNA from Neanderthals, Denisovans and other hominins also has important implications for medicine.
“The fact that a good fraction of the people running around in the world today have DNA from archaic humans like Neanderthals is of important consequence to who we are,” says Reich. “So I think that knowing that and trying to understand the implications of that for health is something that will be with us for the rest of our the rest of our time as a species.”Researchers describe Pääbo as intense and driven, but also collegial and generous.
Reich says that working with Pääbo and the team he organized to sequence and analyse the first Neanderthal genome was inspirational. “It was the best consortium ever,” Reich says. “He recognized how special and unique this type of data they were producing was.” This eventually inspired Reich to set up his own ancient DNA laboratory.
Pääbo’s influence on ancient DNA work has been such that it’s hard to imagine where the field would be without him. “He’s the godfather of the field,” says Skoglund.This is a breaking news story that will be updated throughout the day.