Svante Paabo was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research “concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution,” according to the organisation that bestows the prize.
The Karolinska Institute in Sweden’s Nobel Assembly bestows the prize, which is undoubtedly one of the most renowned in the scientific community. It is valued 10 million Swedish crowns ($900,357).
It is the first of the awards for this year.
The Nobel prizes for achievements in science, literature, and peace were established in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and rich businessman Alfred Nobel; the economics prize was added subsequently.
With the COVID-19 epidemic in the spotlight, many believe that medical science will eventually be recognised for creating the vaccines that have helped the globe resume some kind of normalcy.
Even still, it often takes years for a piece of research to be recognised, with committees tasked with choosing the winners trying to make a confident judgement about its entire worth in the midst of a field that is always crowded with rivals.
The Nobel feast, a celebration of old-world pomp and glitz after years of societal estrangement, should in any case return to Stockholm this year following a two-year break due to the pandemic.
Americans David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian won the medical prize the previous year for their discovery of receptors in the skin that feel touch and temperature and translate the physical stimulus into nerve impulses.
Numerous eminent scientists have won awards in the discipline in the past, most notably Alexander Fleming, who shared the 1945 prize for discovering penicillin, and Robert Koch, who won in 1905 for his research on tuberculosis.
