Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Is Awarded to Svante Pääbo

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded on Monday to Svante Pääbo, a Swedish-born scientist whose decades spent trying to extract DNA from 40,000-year-old bones culminated in the unveiling of the Neanderthal genome in 2010.

The publication of that genome opened the door to investigating questions that had bedeviled paleontologists since Neanderthal fossils were first found in a German quarry in 1856: How did those early humans relate to modern ones, and what made them different?

Dr. Pääbo’s abiding obsession — how to recover and analyze ancient genetic material — seemed destined to founder in the face of vexing technical difficulties, the Nobel committee said on Monday.

Ancient DNA suffers from chemical damage and tends to be present in ancient samples at very low levels. It can easily be drenched in the DNA of scientists charged with handling it, making it difficult to distinguish ancient genes from modern ones. Bacteria can leave DNA in fossils, too, forcing scientists to learn how to pick out those genes as well.

But Dr. Pääbo harnessed the latest technology for sequencing DNA. When he needed more bone, he navigated the political sensitivities of obtaining chunks of fossils from other countries. He designed “clean rooms,” labs with high standards for cleanliness that protected specimens from contamination.

And once he and his team unraveled the millions of fragments of DNA in the fossils, they used sophisticated statistical techniques to pick out the modern genetic contaminants.

“It was certainly considered to be impossible to recover DNA from 40,000-year-old bones,” said Dr. Nils-Göran Larsson, the chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine and a professor in medical biochemistry for the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

Dr. Pääbo’s stringent standards and his “bioinformatic and chemical tricks,” Dr. Larsson said, made such a discovery possible. Dr. Larsson said that they would “allow us to compare changes between contemporary Homo sapiens and ancient hominids. And this, over the years to come, will give us huge insights into human physiology.”

The research helped to establish that modern humans and Neanderthals share a common ancestor that lived some 600,000 years ago. Dr. Pääbo and his team also found genetic evidence that, during periods of coexistence, modern humans and Neanderthals had children together.

Neanderthals lived across much of Europe until they disappeared about 30,000 years ago for reasons that remain the subject of intense debate. The ancestors of modern humans evolved in Africa before migrating to Europe and Asia, where they mixed with more ancient human forms and picked up genetic changes that strengthened their chances of survival in new environments.

Those included gene variants that improved the ability to live at high altitudes and influenced how the immune system responded to infection.

Even in the aftermath of Dr. Pääbo’s signature findings, though, the most fundamental question — what makes modern humans unique — remains shrouded in mystery. His research identified genetic variants that are common among living humans but absent in Neanderthals, offering a sort of blueprint for the set of mutations that distinguish modern humans and underpin their dramatic departure from Neanderthal culture and behavior.

But linking those mutations to modern human traits — the capacity for figurative art, complex cultures, large social collaborations and advanced innovation — remains out of reach.

Still, Dr. Pääbo’s research allowed scientists to begin that investigation, said Dr. Anna Wedell, a professor of medical genetics at the Karolinska Institute, who described his work during the Nobel Committee’s announcement on Monday. The findings, she said, “allow us to address one of the most fundamental questions of all: What makes us unique?”

Dr. Pääbo has a bit of Nobel Prize history in his own family: In a 2014 memoir, “Neanderthal Man,” he wrote that he was “the secret extramarital son of Sune Bergstrom, a well-known biochemist who had shared the Nobel Prize in 1982.”

It took some three decades of research for Dr. Pääbo to describe the Neanderthal genome that won him his own prize. He first went looking for DNA in mummies and older animals, like extinct cave bears and ground sloths, before he turned his attention to ancient humans.

“I longed to bring a new rigor to the study of human history by investigating DNA sequence variation in ancient humans,” he wrote in the memoir.

It would be no easy feat. Ancient genetic material was so degraded and difficult to untangle that the science writer Elizabeth Kolbert, in her book “The Sixth Extinction,” likened the process to reassembling a “Manhattan telephone book from pages that have been put through a shredder, mixed with yesterday’s trash, and left to rot in a landfill.”

Reporting was contributed by Cora Engelbrecht and Isabella Kwai.

Who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2021?

The prize was awarded jointly to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries about key mechanisms of how people sense heat, cold, touch and body movements.

When will the other Nobel Prizes be announced?

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was the first of several prizes to be awarded over the next week.

• The Nobel Prize in Physics will be awarded on Tuesday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Last year, Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi won for their work detailing humanity’s role in climate change.

• The Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be awarded on Wednesday by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Last year, Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan won for their development of a new tool that spurred research into new drugs and reduced the chemistry’s effect on the environment.

• The Nobel Prize in Literature will be awarded on Thursday by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Last year, Abdulrazak Gurnah won for “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”

• The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded on Friday by the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo. Last year, Maria Ressa and Dmitri A. Muratov, both journalists, won for their efforts in the struggle to protect press freedoms.

• Next week, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be awarded on Oct. 10 by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Last year, the prize went to David Card, Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens.

All of the prize announcements will also be streamed live by the Nobel Prize organization. Prize winners will receive their awards at a ceremony in Stockholm in December.