Author Bio
• Birth— April 20, 1955
• Where—Stockholm, Sweden
• Education—Ph.D., Uppsala University
• Awards—numerous scientific prizes (below)
• Currently—lives in Leipzig, Germany
Svante Paabo is a Swedish biologist specializing in evolutionary genetics. He was born in 1955 in Stockholm to Sune Bergström, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Bengt I. Samuelsson and John R. Vane in 1982, and his mother, Estonian chemist Karin Paabo.
He earned his PhD from Uppsala University in 1986. Since 1997, he has been director of the
Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig,
Germany.
Career
In August 2002, Paabo's department published findings about the "language gene", FOXP2, which is lacking or damaged in some individuals with language disabilities.
Paabo is considered one of the founders of paleogenetics, a discipline that uses the methods of genetics to study early humans and other ancient populations. In 2006, he announced a plan to reconstruct the entire genome of Neanderthals. In 2007, Paabo was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people of the year.
In 2009, at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), it was announced that the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology had completed the first draft version of the Neanderthal genome. Over 3 billion base pairs were sequenced in collaboration with the 454 Life Sciences Corporation. This project, led by Paabo, will shed new light on the recent evolutionary history of modern humans.
In March 2010, Paabo and his coworkers published a report about the DNA analysis of a finger bone found in the Denisova Cave in Siberia; the results suggest that the bone belonged to an extinct member of the genus Homo that had not yet been recognized, the Denisova hominin.
In May 2010, Paabo and his colleagues published a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome in the journal Science. He and his team also concluded that there was probably interbreeding between Neanderthals and Eurasian (but not African) humans. There is growing support in the scientific community for this theory of admixture between archaic and anatomically-modern humans.
Awards and recognitions
1992 - Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft*
2000 - Elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
2009 - Kistler Prize of the Foundation For the Future for his work on ancient DNA
2010 - Theodor Bücher Medal of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies
2013 -Gruber Prize in Genetics for ground breaking research in evolutionary genetics.
* The highest honour awarded in German research. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/20/2014.)