(1)_page-0001.jpg)
What is the article about?
- The Nobel Prize for Medicine this year will be awarded to Svante Pääbo, who is believed to have brought about the Copernican revolution in the field of Anthropology.
Relevance:
- GS3: Science and Technology- Developments and their Applications and Effects in Everyday Life; Prelims: Nobel Prizes.
What is the Nobel prize winning research of Svante Pääbo?
- Svante Pääbo Wins Nobel Prize for Unravelling the Mysteries of Neanderthal DNA.
In 2010 he was able to present the world with the first version of a fully sequenced Neandertal genome.
What is the significance of this research?
- The Nobel Prize for Medicine this year will be awarded to Svante Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist and a director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Science being of an increasingly collaborative and competitive nature.
- It is a tribute to the originality and revolutionary implications of Pääbo’s research that in a world perennially reshaped by advances in biology.
- Pääbo, 67, has quietly instigated a Copernican revolution. Much like the latter placed the sun at the centre and demoted the earth to another circumscribed, perambulatory planet, Pääbo brought Neanderthals — believed to be among the many human-like species and losers of the evolutionary race — to the centre on the question of human evolution.
- Thanks to his work, it is now known that Europeans and Asians carry anywhere between 1%-4% of Neanderthal DNA.
- Thus, a large fraction of humanity will be influenced in terms of propensity to disease and adaptability to conditions by a species that evolved, like humans, in Africa, but 1,00,000 years earlier. Pääbo demonstrated this by pioneering and perfecting techniques to extract DNA from fossil remains.
- Pääbo and his colleagues eventually published the first Neanderthal genome sequence in 2010. To put that in perspective, the first complete sequence of the human genome was only completed in 2003.
- Comparative analyses with the human genome demonstrated that the most recent common ancestor of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens lived around 8,00,000 years ago; that both species frequently lived in proximity and interbred to an extent that the Neanderthal genetic stamp lives on.
- In 2008, a 40,000-year-old fragment from a finger bone yielded DNA that, in Pääbo’s lab, turned out to be from an entirely new species of hominin called Denisova. This was the first time that a new species had been discovered based on DNA analysis. Further analysis showed that it too had interbred with humans and 6% of human genomes in parts of South East Asia are of Denisovan ancestry.
Way Forward:
- These discoveries throw up philosophical questions on what it means to be a ‘species’.
- Pääbo’s win must inspire future biologists in India to pursue deep questions and use science to shed new light rather than compartmentalise themselves in an academic straitjacket.
