This year’s first Nobel laureate sequenced the DNA of Neanderthals
Svante Paabo also discovered an entire, new human species
The first Nobel prize to be announced each year is often referred to as the “Nobel prize for medicine”. But that is not its real name. It is actually the prize for “physiology or medicine”. And this year’s award was firmly on the physiological side of the divide. The winner—and there was only one, rather than the usual two or three—was Svante Paabo, a man who has the rare distinction of having invented an entire scientific discipline, palaeogenomics, more or less by himself.
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