The Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden has announced on Monday, October 4, 2022 that this year’s Nobel Prize in medicine has been awarded to Swedish scientist Svante Paabo (researcher from the German city of Leipzig) for his discoveries on human evolution.
Paabo, a director and geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, led ground-breaking work to sequence the genome of long-extinct Neanderthals from 40,000-year-old bone fragments.
Last year’s medicine recipients were David Julius and Ardem Papoutian for their discoveries into how the human body perceives temperature and touch.
The prizes carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) in each category.
The medicine prize, which is usually announced at the beginning of October, kicked off a week of Nobel Prize announcements. It continues Tuesday with the physics prize, with chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on October 10.
The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.
The awards will be handed out on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.
