Old stuff — Nobel in Medicine goes to the man who brought us the Neanderthal genome Svante Pbo played a central role in developing ways of looking into humanity’s past.
John Timmer – Oct 3, 2022 2:00 pm UTC EnlargeKarsten Mbius reader comments 0 with 0 posters participating Share this story Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to a single recipient on Monday: Svante Pbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Pbo’s work will be familiar to regular readers of these pages, as he was the driving force behind the completion of the Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes, and he has helped us understand how these lineages contributed to the genomes of modern humans. This has more to tell us about physiology and medicine than a casual glance might suggest.
Pbo’s central role in this story and his intense focus on this topic are likely to allow widespread acceptance of his sole-recipient status, despite the Nobels’ long history of controversy over who gets acknowledged. But Pbo also benefitted from being lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, when a revolution in DNA sequencing technology provided the capabilities his ideas so sorely needed.
I briefly met Pbo back in the 1990s when we were both working at Berkeley. He was already interested in old DNA and was working in one of the best labs for that sort of thing, run by the late Allan Wilson . PCR had been commercialized less than a decade earlier, and Wilson’s lab was pushing the limits of the technique as a way of obtaining very old DNA that was a rare component of a sample that might have been in the environment for centuries or morefragments of egg shells from the extinct moa birds made regular appearances in the lab at the time.
But this was the pre-genome era, and getting sequences from that DNA was a week-long affair that involved setting up thin polymer gels about the size of a small desk and days-long exposures of X-ray film, followed by tedious interpretation of the film by eye. People had done the math and had recognized that we’d need entirely new DNA sequencing technology in order to complete large genomes; they argued over what might work.
Pbo and his collaborators couldn’t have done what they ultimately accomplished if it weren’t for the work of countless people who developed new generations of DNA sequencing machines. And he wouldn’t have known what sequences to even look for if it weren’t for the completion of the human genome. That’s not to say that he and his collaborators didn’t make major advances in methods that specifically pull out ancient human DNA sequences. But there was also luck involved in being interested in a problem where some of the technical hurdles that prevented progress were on the cusp of being overcome for unrelated reasons.
The list of Pbo’s accomplishments is extensive. His work was critical to building our first picture of the Neanderthals as a population, providing a sense of how many existed, where they migrated, and which populations interbred. He eventually followed that up with the entire nuclear genome of the Neanderthals, showing many ways they differed from usand that those differences werent enough to keep our ancestors from interbreeding. Page: 1 2 Next → reader comments 0 with 0 posters participating Share this story Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit John Timmer John became Ars Technica’s science editor in 2007 after spending 15 years doing biology research at places like Berkeley and Cornell. Email jtimmer@arstechnica.com // Twitter @j_timmer Advertisement
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