2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Svante Pääbo. The prize was announced by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm on 3 October 2022.

The citation

The citation reads: "for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution".

The laureate

Svante Pääbo was born in 1955 in Stockholm, Sweden, and is affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Okinawa and Leipzig University, Leipzig.

Why it matters

Pääbo sequenced the genome of the Neanderthals and discovered a previously unknown human relative, the Denisovans, showing that they interbred with our ancestors.

The prize

The prize is worth 10 million Swedish kronor. It will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will founded the prizes in 1895.