Svante Pääbo – Prizewinner 2018

Svante Pääbo is to receive the Körber European Science Prize, endowed with 750,000 euros. He is to be honoured for his pioneering achievements in the field of palaeogenetics, of which he is considered the founder. One of Pääbo's most important scientific breakthroughs is the decoding of the Neanderthal genome. His work has revolutionized our understanding of the evolutionary history of modern humans; it has been significantly conducive to the realization that Neanderthals and other extinct human groups have contributed to the ancestry of present-day humans.
Svante Pääbo, 63, studied Egyptology and Medicine at Uppsala University. As a postgraduate, writing his PhD in immunology, he also demonstrated that DNA can survive in ancient Egyptian mummies and thus gained professional fame as a pioneer in the new field of palaeogenetics. Palaeogeneticists study the genomes of ancient organisms and draw conclusions about the course of evolution.
After completing his doctorate, Pääbo worked in the team of evolutionary biologist Allan Wilson at the University of California in Berkeley. From 1990 he headed his own laboratory at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In 1997 Pääbo became one of five directors at the newly founded Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, where he is still active.
The Körber European Science Prize 2018 was presented to Svante Pääbo on 7 September in the Great Festival Hall of Hamburg Town Hall.
Report of the presentation of the prize
Insights into the origins of mankind
It all started with a mummy. Explaining his interest in research, Svante Pääbo told journalist Ranga Yogeshwar that his mother had taken him on a vacation to Egypt when he was a teenager. Seeing the preserved exhibits of human ancestors, his curiosity about their past was aroused and his career in research began. But at first it was difficult to prove that human DNA was still present in these finds. Impurities could not be excluded. But the new research field of palaeogenetics was born and Pääbo was regarded as its founder. And Pääbo soon immersed himself even further into the past. After some partial successes in DNA research, Pääbo decided in the early 2000s, when DNA sequencing methods had become much more efficient, to decipher the entire Neanderthal genome. And in 2010, Pääbo's team actually succeeded in reconstructing a first version of the Neanderthal genome from bones tens of thousands of years old.
Gallery
Photos: David Ausserhofer
Videos
Portrait
Körber Lecture 2018: Human origins from a neandertal perspective
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Photos
The following photos are free to use in the context of news coverage with the credit Körber-Stiftung/Friedrun Reinhold.
more Photos
Topic Neandertal (Copyright: Max-Planck-Institute Leipzig)
Topic DNA from extinct humans discovered in cave sediments (Copyright: Max-Planck-Institute Leipzig)
Topic Denisova (Copyright: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)