Researcher Pääbo in Leipzig: "I haven't quite digested it yet"

Created: 03/10/2022, 16:52

The Swedish evolutionary researcher Svante Pääbo stands at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig at the replica of a Neanderthal skeleton.

© Hendrik Schmidt/dpa

The evolution researcher Svante Pääbo was completely surprised by the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Medicine this Monday.

When he called from Sweden, he initially believed that someone might want to trick him, Pääbo told the German Press Agency in Leipzig.

"First I thought: Can this be a joke?" He did not know that the decision should be announced on Monday.

Leipzig - "I haven't quite digested it yet," said the 67-year-old Swede, who has been researching in Germany for decades, in the afternoon, a few hours after the call.

"The mobile phone has been going crazy for a few hours." The award is "of course super great", also for the working group and the research field.

She gives the feeling that the field of research no longer appears peripheral, but has "arrived".

After the news, he toasted alcohol-free with his wife, two children and a few neighbors.

On Tuesday morning he first had to go shopping for sparkling wine.

Pääbo is director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

Among other things, he was the first researcher to sequence the Neanderthal genome.

On Monday in Stockholm, the Nobel Prize Committee awarded him the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his findings on human evolution.

dpa