Svante Pääbo

Svante Pääbo ( born April 20, 1955 in Stockholm ) is a Swedish physician and biologist. He is considered the founder of paleogenetics. In 1984 he became the first graduate student cloning the DNA of a mummy. The message in the journal Nature in 1985 graced the front page, a very unusual honor for a PhD. In his further scientific career, he has specialized in evolutionary genetics.

Life

Svante Pääbo was born the son of Nobel laureates Sune Bergström and Karin Pääbo and grew up in Stockholm. Following his schooling, he attended a school for interpreters one year. From 1975 he studied Egyptology, Russian, history of science and medicine at Uppsala University, where he in 1986 with a thesis in molecular immunology his PhD, doctoral degrees in the natural sciences, gained. Within a year, followed by a short stay at the Institute of Molecular Biology at the University of Zurich and a cancer research center in London. The period from 1987 to 1990, he spent a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at Berkeley in the laboratory of Allan Wilson. Pääbo 1990 was appointed to a C4 - Professor of Biology at the University of Munich. In 1997 he moved to Leipzig to the newly founded Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Since 1999 he heads there as one of five directors of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics.

Science

During his doctoral research in Uppsala Pääbo could use new molecular biological techniques to recover DNA from tissue samples. Here he had the idea to use the same techniques for dead tissue material. With the help of a former professor in Egyptology he could obtain tissue samples from mummies from the Egyptological collections in Uppsala and the Pergamon Museum in East Berlin. In 1984, he was then for the first time to isolate genetic material from cells of the mummy preparations. However, the results published in the same year in the journal Antiquity of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR, no attention was paid. It was not until the publication in 1985 in the international journal Nature appearing ensured a scientific sensation.

After completing his dissertation Svante Pääbo competed with Professor Allan Wilson in Berkeley on a postdoc position and was accepted in 1987. The group of Wilson was the only one that also employed at that time with the isolation of genetic material from fossil tissue. The following three years at Wilson were very successful because they were able to apply a new method for amplification of DNA, polymerase chain reaction, a whole series of extinct animals such as Thylacine, giant sloth, cave bear or mammoth.

At the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig Pääbo employs mainly the question of what genetic changes in evolutionary history make up the modern man. The members of his research group compare genetic material of modern man both with other species of the genus Homo, such as the Neanderthals, as well as with other early human species and the apes. In 2002 he published, among other results of his research to the " language gene " FOXP2, from whose absence or occurring defects resulting speech disability. 2010 belonged Pääbo to the authors of a study that compared the evidence that around 40,000 years ago in the Altai Mountains next to Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, a third, independent of these two species there immigrant population of the species has lived Homo, called Denisova person.

A current project is concerned with the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome. A 2010 published study found that the genome of Neanderthals a significantly greater similarity to the genome of Europeans and Asians than with the genome of Africans. It was concluded " that gene flow from Neanderthals to the ancestors of non-Africans occurred before the Eurasian groups from each other parted ," that is in the Middle East, where Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans in the period from 110,000 years ago until about 50,000 years coexisted. As early as 1997 had Pääbos Munich Working Group in cooperation with the Rheinische Landesmuseum and American scientists compared the mitochondrial DNA of modern Homo sapiens with the Neanderthal and discovered no evidence of gene flow. The Rheinische Landesmuseum had asked for a sample from the upper arm bone of a Neanderthal available.

Awards and Affiliations

Pääbo is since 1999 an associate member of the class Life Sciences Medicine of the Berlin- Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.

Publications (selection)

• New light shed on chimp genome
• Why humans are brainier than chimps
• Genome ' treasure trove '
• DNA clues to Neanderthals