shine new light

This year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine will be awarded to Svante Pabo, a Swedish geneticist and director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. With science being of an increasingly collaborative and competitive nature, recent trends in Nobel Prizes show that there are usually multiple winners for each prize. It is such an homage to the originality of Pabo’s research and the revolutionary implications that in a world repeatedly changed by advances in biology, he has been chosen this year as the sole winner of the Medicine or Physiology Prize – something that has been recognized for 2016 Haven’t seen since. Pabo, 67, quietly instigated a Copernican Revolution. Much as the latter centered the Sun and moved Earth to another circumscribed, orbital planet, Pabo brought in the Neanderthal—one of many believed to be human-like species and losers of the evolutionary race. – Evolutionary progress on the question of man at the center. Thanks to their work, it is now known that Europeans and Asians carry anywhere between 1%-4% of Neanderthal DNA. Thus, a large part of humanity would be affected in terms of disease propensity and adaptation to conditions, which evolved like humans in Africa, but 100,000 years ago. Pabo demonstrated this by pioneering and proven techniques for extracting DNA from fossil remains, a difficult task because they contain so little and are easily contaminated. Building on these methods, Pabo and his colleagues eventually published the first Neanderthal genome sequence in 2010. To put this in perspective, the first complete sequence of the human genome was completed only in 2003. Comparative analysis with the human genome demonstrated that the most recent common ancestor of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens lived about 800,000 years ago; That the two species often live in close proximity and are intertwined to the extent that the Neanderthal lives on the genetic stamp.

In 2008, a 40,000-year-old fragment of finger bone yielded DNA that, in Pabo’s lab, yielded an entirely new species of hominin named Denisova. This was the first time that a new species was discovered based on DNA analysis. Further analysis showed that it also interbred with humans and that 6% of human genomes in parts of Southeast Asia are of Denisovan ancestry. These discoveries raise philosophical questions about what it means to be a ‘species’. Pabo’s victory should inspire future biologists in India to pursue deeper questions and use science to shed new light instead of dividing it into an academic straitjacket.