Why Svante Pääbo Getting The 'Nobel For Medicine' Is Good News

On 3 October 2022 the Nobel Assembly announced that Svante Pääbo has won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine ‘for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution’.

The scientist working with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany is considered as the principal founding father of paleogenomics – a new discipline.

Odyssey of Pääbo with ancient DNA started as early as 1985 when he made a genetic study of an Egyptian mummy. He pointed out the contamination of DNA from such ancient specimens. His work lead to the creation of rigorous protocols for extracting ancient DNA without contamination.

In 1997 he joined the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

The year 2010 was an important year for Pääbo.

That year he and his colleagues reported a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome, created from three individuals. The genome thus drafted, collected from three Neanderthals, was composed of more than 4 billion nucleotides from three individuals.

The study revealed that 'Neanderthals shared more genetic variants with present-day humans in Eurasia than with present-day humans in sub-Saharan Africa.'

The same year Pääbo and colleagues extracted mitochondrial DNA from a finger-bone discovered at Denisova a cave in Altai mountains, Siberia, Russia.

The analysis of this maternal line DNA belonging to what can be called the deep palaeontological time revealed a new hominin species.

Dr. Niraj Rai, the Group Head for Ancient DNA Lab at Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences, explained how the team of Pääbo and his colleagues helped solve an archaeological puzzle by playing genome detectives:

The team announced this discovery in their paper in Nature titled: 'The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia.'

Talking to Swarajya, he stated that this recognition of the domain of ancient DNA studies is heartening to him. He pointed out how the conventionally held model of humans replacing Neanderthals, a very binary and conflict-based model, got changed to a more flexible, dynamic model of humans and Neanderthal having genetic and perhaps cultural exchanges as well.

We all have Neanderthal and Denisovan genetic components in us. This makes the scenario of our palaeontological past more complicated, richer and more interactive.

Dr. Niraj Rai is equally jubilant.

Dr. Chaubey also draws attention to another important episode in the odyssey of the present Nobel laureate.

In September 2020, amidst the raging first wave of Covid-19, Pääbo and his colleague Hugo Zeberg (also from Max Planck Institute) published a paper in Nature: 'The major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19 is inherited from Neanderthals'.

Subsequently in 2021, a team of Indian scientists, which also included Dr. Chaubey, made some critical observations on the Pääbo paper in a paper published in Nature's Scientific Reports:

The study of ancient genomics is a path filled with mines. They could be distorted by people to further racial politics. Digging into past in colonial times actually gave rise to pseudo-scientific concepts like Aryan race and Aryan conquest of Harappans and race-based origin theory for the Indian caste system.

Time and again studies have spurred such racial politics in India. However, detailed genetic studies have revealed a much complex picture of ancient Indian past showing admixture, interaction and co-existence of many ethnic communities.

A hard-hitting editorial published in Nature on this aspect of the studies of ancient DNA said:

Unfortunately in India, the importance of paleogenomics is not appreciated at all, according to Dr. Chaubey.

Dr. Rai points out that there is what he calls the 'dominance of global north' in this newly emerging field. There may be various reasons for this, he explains, from prohibiting high costs to healthcare research being of higher priority.