That’s right. This year has seen not one, but two queer parents winning Nobel Prizes! Svante Pääbo is this year’s Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution. He’s also a bisexual dad.
The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet, which awarded the prize, said of Pääbo’s work:
Through his pioneering research, Svante Pääbo accomplished something seemingly impossible: sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans. He also made the sensational discovery of a previously unknown hominin, Denisova. Importantly, Pääbo also found that gene transfer had occurred from these now extinct hominins to Homo sapiens following the migration out of Africa around 70,000 years ago. This ancient flow of genes to present-day humans has physiological relevance today, for example affecting how our immune system reacts to infections.
Pääbo also came out as bisexual in his 2014 book, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes. While I have not read the book myself, the Genetic Literacy Project reports that it includes a discussion of his “lengthy affair with a (female) scientist who also happened to be the wife of a colleague/collaborator…. An affair that resulted in a son and marriage on a remote beach in Hawaii. Told with a strong implication that it wasn’t that big a deal. That they all lived happily ever after.” The couple is now raising a son and a daughter.
Pääbo’s own birth was also the result of an affair, involving another Nobel laureate. The New Yorker reported in 2011 that “His mother, a chemist [Karin Pääbo], was an Estonian refugee. For a time, she worked in the laboratory of a biochemist named Sune Bergström, who later won a Nobel Prize. Pääbo was the product of a lab affair between the two, and, although he knew who his father was, he wasn’t supposed to discuss it. Bergström had a wife and another son; Pääbo’s mother, meanwhile, never married.”
Pääbo was born in 1955 in Stockholm. He defended his Ph.D thesis in 1986 at Uppsala University and was a postdoctoral fellow at University of Zürich, Switzerland and later at University of California, Berkeley. He became professor at the University of Munich, Germany in 1990. In 1999 he founded the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany where he is still active. He also holds a position as adjunct Professor at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan.
His work has implications not only for medicine, but also in how we understand aspects of anthropology and society. Geneticist David Reich, who worked with Dr. Pääbo on sequencing the genome, told the New York Times that Pääbo’s work “Not only created a new map of human migration, but also offered evidence of considerable mixing between groups in distant human history,” debunking myths about racial purity.
I should have posted about Pääbo, who won his prize Monday, before posting about Carolyn Bertozzi, the chemist and lesbian mom who won this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry today, but I’m just getting back from a trip to a family wedding and catching up on a lot of things. Two queer parent Nobel laureates in one year (and the Nobel season isn’t over yet)! How great is that?
Congratulations to Pääbo and his family!