Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: After a two-year hiatus because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the first Nobel Prize this year has gone to the son of a Nobel Laureate.
The Nobel Prizes, beginning in 1901, and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, beginning in 1969, have been awarded 603 times to 962 people and 25 organizations. Only a few of them are winners from the same family.
Swedish scientist Svante Paabo is among them. He won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries “concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution”, the award-giving body said on Monday.
The Nobel Assembly of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute awards the Prize, arguably among the most prestigious in the scientific world, and is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($900,357), the media reported.
It is the first of this year’s batch of prizes.
Paabo, son of the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Sune Bergstrom, is credited with transforming the study of human origins after developing approaches to allow for the examination of DNA sequences from archaeological and paleontological remains.
His key achievements include sequencing an entire Neanderthal genome to reveal the link between extinct people and modern humans.
Besides, he also proved the existence of a previously unknown human species called the Denisovans, from a 40,000-year-old fragment of a finger bone discovered in Siberia.
Created in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and wealthy business owner Alfred Nobel, the prizes for achievements in science, literature, and peace have been awarded since 1901, though the economics prize is a later addition.
The Covid-19 pandemic brought to center stage medical research, and many expected the fast-tracked development of the vaccines, with which the world regained some sense of normality, might be rewarded this year.
But it usually takes many years for any research to be honored, with the committees charged with picking the winners looking to determine its full value with some certainty amongst what is always a packed field of contenders.
This year’s festivities should mark the return of the Nobel banquet in Stockholm after a two-year hiatus because of the pandemic, an event redolent of old-world pomp and glamour after over two years of social distancing.
Svante Paabo has joined the world’s only eight illustrious families that produced generations of eminent scientists.
Four were in physics: the Thomsons (J. J. in 1906 and George in 1937), Braggs (William and Lawrence together in 1915), Bohrs (Niels in 1922 and his son Aage in 1975), and the Siegbahns (Manne in 1924 and his son Kai in 1981).
Marie Curie and her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie both won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1911 and 1935), after Marie and her husband, Pierre, had won the physics Nobel in 1903.
The Kornbergs branched out more (Arthur, physiology or medicine, 1959; Roger, chemistry, 2006), as did Hans von Euler-Chelpin (chemistry, 1929) and his son Ulf von Euler (physiology or medicine, 1970).