Molecules could, essentially, click together like lego bricks, making them easier to work with. Sharpless coined the concept of click chemistry about 20 years ago, identifying it as a simple and reliable form of chemistry, involving quick reactions and avoiding unwanted byproducts. “Svante brought together teams of scientists who, thanks to his leadership, tenacity, and rigor, established a field that has since allowed unexpected insights into human evolutions, paleontology, ecology, and so many other disciplines.” “Svante’s insights … inspired a generation of scientists and established paleogenomics as a rigorous field of research,” evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro said in an interview with Science. This ancestral population, now known as Denisovans, were the first hominid species to be classified by genes alone, instead of fossils. Not only were Pӓӓbo and his team able to derive a genome of a known hominid, but they were able to discover a previously unknown human population from a fragment of a finger bone.
This research led to the discovery that Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans interbred more than 100,000 years ago, and that individuals in Europe and Asia today derive between one and four percent of their ancestry from Neanderthals. His team continued to work with Neanderthal DNA, culminating in being able to sequence the entire genome. Pӓӓbo relied on mitochondrial DNA, which is preserved in larger amounts than other types of DNA, from over 50,000 year old bones. In 1997, Pӓӓbo became the first person to successfully retrieve and sequence ancient DNA from Neanderthals. Over time, DNA becomes chemically modified and degrades into short segments, leaving only trace amounts of DNA which have been contaminated with bacteria and DNA from contemporary humans. In his work, Pӓӓbo overcame the challenges of extracting DNA from prehistoric bones. Pӓӓbo is a pioneer in the field of ancient DNA, and his methods advanced the field exponentially. Far from an elaborate prank, the Nobel Assembly awarded Pӓӓbo with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for “his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution” Svante Pӓӓbo revealed when he first heard he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology he thought it was “an elaborate prank on research group,” he said in a press conference.
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