A portrait of Svante Pääbo, the new winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine

Kühn – that’s how Svante Pääbo could be described. The native Swede once tried to extract DNA from ancient Egyptian mummies, with dubious success. He now calls the gloriously published sequence “a contamination like a thunderbolt”. A decade later he nonchalantly had one of the most famous bone finds in Germany drilled into: the Neanderthal man has done it to him, with his help Pääbo wants to fathom human nature.

The medical graduate with a soft spot for Egyptology has become an experienced basic researcher. His greatest interest is in our origins, which Pääbo is pursuing today as one of the founding directors at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He is one of the pioneers of paleogenetics – with considerable influence, some colleagues admire or fear him almost like the godfather.

Pääbo grew up in Stockholm as the illegitimate son of a single mother, the father is a Nobel Prize winner, he himself is not a model student, but an enthusiastic climber, and his own children came late. Pääbo revealed his career last year in a kind of double biography. What she reveals about what is happening in his relatively young field of research, she does not conceal in private.

Since he first succeeded in 1997 in deciphering genetic information from the bones of our relatives who died out many millennia ago, Pääbo and his team have been unveiling chapters in the history of evolution time and time again. They allow intimate insights. The gene comparisons that are now possible prove, for example, that our ancestors did not despise food, that we probably inherited a lot from Neanderthals and apparently not only from them.

The future may hold more surprises, as Svante Pääbo’s team was able to extract some DNA from human remains that had been lying in the soil of a Spanish cave for more than 400,000 years. Today the prehistoric man seeker Svante Pääbo was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize.