![]() ![]() Hans von Euler-Chelpin won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1929 and his son Ulf von Euler for Medicine in 1970. Physicist Niels Bohr was awarded the Nobel in 1922 and his son Aage N. William Bragg won the Nobel for Physics in 1915 and Lawrence Bragg in 1915. Previously, only three other father-child pairs won the Nobel Prize. Unfortunately, Pääbo’s father didn’t live to see the day that he and his son would form a rare union. “It was pretty weird with hindsight,” Pääbo said.īergström died in 2005, and it was only then that his family learned about Pääbo. Bergström’s kept Pääbo’s existence a total secret from his family, and would visit Pääbo as a child on Saturdays. Bergström had an affair with Pääbo’s mother, the Estonian chemist Karin Pääbo, when the two worked in the same lab. ![]() Pääbo was the illegitimate child of Sune Bergström, who won the 1982 Nobel prize for discovering prostaglandins. Perhaps its worth noting that Pääbo’s career was inspired by his biochemist father, with whom he shared a complicated relationship. The techniques pioneered by the Swedish scientists are now routinely used in labs across the world to untangle the complex web of human evolution to piece apart what makes modern humans unique but also ultimately answer how we got here in the first place. Thanks to Pääbo’s contributions, an entirely novel field of science has emerged, known as paleogenomics, which is the study of ancient genomes. Today, populations in Melanesia and other parts of South-East Asia have up to 6% Denisova DNA. Pääbo had, in effect, identified a new species of human now known as the Denisovans.Ĭomparative analyses later showed - as was the case with Neanderthals - that modern humans intimately mingled with Denisovans. When the DNA was sequenced, everyone was blown away when they found that the DNA didn’t match any known species of human. The conditions inside the cave proved extremely fortuitous, as the DNA was exceptionally well preserved for its age. In 2008, he sequenced DNA from a 40,000-year-old finger bone fragment found in the Denisova cave, in southern Siberia. A new species of human Credit: Nobel Prize.Īll of these are remarkable achievements for any scientist, but Pääbo wasn’t done just yet. To this day, people of European or Asian descent have inherited between 1% and 4% of their genomes from Neanderthals. People could only imagine what kind of cultural exchanges took place between the two species of humans, but Pääbo was able to reveal at least one undeniable thing: Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interbred. Previously, artifacts and fossils found in Europe showed that modern humans and Neanderthals shared the continent for several thousand years and must have interacted. This research showed that Neanderthals shared a common ancestor with Homo sapiens as early as 800,000 years ago. ![]() Pääbo took things to the next level in 2010, taking advantage of rapid advances in technology to sequence the first complete genome of a Neanderthal, including nuclear DNA. This was a monumental achievement that for the first time revealed the genetic sequence of an extinct relative. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |