Today, Monday, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm announced that this year it will award the Nobel Prize in Medicine to Svante Papau, a researcher from the German city of Leipzig, for his discoveries in the field of human evolution.
Babu is director and research fellow at the German Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Max Planck, the first researcher, among other things, to sequence the Neanderthal genome.
Papo made a name for himself in this field by sequencing the genome of a Neanderthal, an extinct relative of modern humans, and discovering the previously unknown humanoid life form “Denisovian” as he showed that genes contributing to both are still present in modern humans. people.
“By discovering the genetic differences that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominins, his findings provide a framework for studying what makes us unique,” the Nobel Society said in a statement.
Babu was born in Stockholm in 1955 and has been with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany since 1999.
Last year, the award went to researchers David Julius and Erdem Patbutyan, who discovered the cellular receptors humans use to sense temperature and touch.
Nobel Prizes are awarded in the amount of SEK 10 million (US$900,000) in each category.
Traditionally, the annual announcement of the most important prizes on earth opens with the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Medicine in early October.
The Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry will be announced on Tuesday and Wednesday, and on Thursday and Friday the Academy will announce the winners of the Literature Prize and the Peace Prize, respectively.
Finally, next Monday the prize in economics will be announced, although it does not depend on the final will of the founder of the prize and the inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, who lived from 1833 to 1896.
The prizes will be awarded on the anniversary of Nobel’s death on 10 December.
