Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded for studying ancient human ancestors

Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded for studying ancient human ancestors



The wording of the Nobel Committee is: "For his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution." The surname of the newly minted Nobel laureate is read differently: Paabo or Peebo. The scientist bears the surname of his mother of Estonian origin Karin Päebo, although he was born 67 years ago in Stockholm in the family of the Swedish biochemist Sune Bergström, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1982.

Svante Paabo is called one of the founders of the discipline of paleogenetics, which studies ancient people using genetic methods. In this area, he began work in 1984 with the study of ancient Egyptian mummies from the collections of European museums, and in 1985, for the first time in history, the scientist extracted genetic material from mummies. In 2006, a researcher announced a plan to completely decipher the Neanderthal genome. In 2010, the Paabo group, which studied DNA extracted from a fragment of a bone found in the Denisova cave in Altai, came to the conclusion that a previously unknown species existed in antiquity - the Denisovan man. In 2016, a group led by Paabo published a paper that, based on a comparative analysis of the genomes of almost 2,000 people from around the world, concluded that there were at least three episodes of interbreeding between Neanderthals and various groups of Homo sapiens.

Last year, the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology was awarded to David Julis and Ardem Pataputian for their "discovery of temperature and touch receptors." Their discoveries by this year's Laureates in Physiology or Medicine explained how heat, cold and touch can trigger signals in our nervous system. This knowledge is being used to develop treatments for a range of disease conditions, including chronic pain.

Traditionally, the press and Internet resources specializing in science make predictions about who will become the winner of the most prestigious award. It cannot be ruled out that the activities of scientists who have contributed to the development of vaccines against coronavirus can be noted. Last year, often seen as the “predecessors” of the Nobel Prize, the Lasker Prize and the Breakthrough Prize, founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan, and Mark Zuckerberg, were awarded to researchers whose work was critical to the development of a COVID-19 vaccine. The Lasker Prize went to Catalyn Kariko, Senior Vice President of BioNTech, and Drew Weissman, Professor of Vaccine Research at the University of Pennsylvania, for developing a method to use synthetic messenger RNA to fight viruses.

Last year's likely winners included researcher Jacques Miller, whose discoveries about the organization and functioning of the human immune system in the 1960s (particularly B-lymphocytes and T-lymphocytes) underpin vaccine research.

Last year's Breakthrough Prize-winning scientists Shankar Balasubramanian, David Klenerman and Pascal Mayer could be up for the Nobel for their work on next-generation DNA sequencing technologies. Before their breakthrough discoveries, resequencing a complete human genome could take many months and cost millions of dollars. Today, this can be done in a day for about $600, according to the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. The research results of these scientists have changed many areas of knowledge, including biology, ecology, paleoarchaeology, forensics and personalized medicine.

As of last year, only 12 women have been awarded the Nobel Prize in this category (of which only Barbara McClintock became the sole recipient of the prize in 1983 ("for her discovery of mobile genetic elements") without sharing it with other laureates). Tu Yuyou, a Chinese scientist, was last awarded "for her discoveries concerning a new treatment for malaria" in 2015.

“The Nobel Prize is usually awarded to people who made discoveries twenty, thirty, forty years ago. In the 80s and 90s, there were not so many women in leadership positions at universities at that time,” explains David Pendlebury, a senior analyst at the Institute for Scientific Information of the research company Clarivate, who makes Nobel predictions based on how often colleagues cite key articles of certain scientists.

The fact that none of the 2021 M.P. Physiology Laureates was a woman was, for some critics, further evidence of a systemic bias in science, even as more and more women are participating in scientific research.

For its part, CNN offered its own shortlist of women scientists worthy of the Nobel.

One of them is Dr. Mary-Claire King, now professor of medicine and genomic sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine, who discovered the role of the BRCA1 gene mutation in the development of breast and ovarian cancer. Her discovery has enabled genetic testing, which can identify women at increased risk of developing breast cancer, as well as steps to reduce that risk, such as additional screening and preventive surgery.

The candidacy is also proposed for the aforementioned Katalin Cariko, who holds the position of senior vice president of the German company BioNTech, for a breakthrough in the field of vaccine research (in particular, against COVID-19).

Another Nobel-worthy candidate (according to CNN) is Dr. Marilyn Hughes Gaston, who devoted most of her life to studying sickle cell anemia, an inherited disease in which the body cannot produce normal hemoglobin. Affecting children, this disease leads to tissue damage, causing weakness and even death. In 1986, Gaston published the results of a groundbreaking national study that proved the effectiveness of long-term treatment with penicillin in children with sickle cell anemia in preventing septic infections caused by the disease. Thanks to Gaston's work, every baby is screened for sickle cell disease at birth. She also became the first African American woman to lead the U.S. Bureau of Primary Health Care.

But media advice and expert forecasts, as they say, only suggest (so 2022 did not become the time to correct “gender injustice”). But the Nobel Assembly of Karolinska University (Stockholm), which consists of 50 professors, has. And it is this body that determines the Nobel laureates in medicine and physiology. Every year, the Nobel Committee sends out a request for a nomination to the wider scientific community. Members of the Karolinska University Assembly are looking for nominees to nominate 1 to 3 people who have made a discovery in physiology or medicine (while self-nomination is not allowed - in other words, no scientist can nominate himself, but members of scientific communities, deans of medical schools, Nobel Prize winners and other scientists who have received a request from the assembly may nominate a candidate).

In accordance with the rules set by the Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel in 1895, the task of the Nobel Selection Committee is made more difficult by the fact that no more than three people can be awarded the prize, while the collaborative nature of many scientific studies should be taken into account.

For the period from 1901 to 2021, the Nobel Prize

in the field of physiology and medicine was awarded 112 times - and in about a third of cases the award was awarded to only one laureate (this was 39 times). And about a third each accounted for cases when two (34 times) and three (39 times) scientists were awarded. In total, the medical Nobel was awarded to 224 scientists over 120 years.

The youngest laureate in medicine is still Frederick Banting, who was only 32 years old when he was awarded the prize for the discovery of insulin in 1932. And the oldest Nobel Prize winner in this nomination is the American scientist Peyton Rose, who became a laureate at the age of 87 in 1966 "for the discovery of oncogenic viruses." The average age of the awardees is 58 years.



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