The character arc of Svante Pääbo
A life drawn by Character Arc from the public record
Born 20 April 1955 in Stockholm to an Estonian chemist who had fled the Soviet invasion, and to a father who was married to somebody else. Between then and now sit secret laboratory work on Egyptian mummies done at night in 1984, a celebrated paper in Nature in 1985 that turned out to be contamination from his own experiments, an institute founded in Leipzig in 1997, the first Neanderthal genome, and the Nobel Prize in 2022. The line below draws the story so far, in order.
Tap the line to pluck it. Hover or tap any mark for its card. Drawn from the public record of his life; the sources are at the foot of the page.
Who is Svante Pääbo?
The result that made his name was wrong, and he built the field anyway.
He was born in Stockholm in 1955. His mother, Karin Pääbo, was an Estonian chemist who had fled the Soviet invasion of her country in 1944. His father was the Swedish biochemist Sune Bergström, who was married to someone else and who would win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1982. Pääbo grew up outside that arrangement, and only in 2004, the year his father died, did he learn that he had a half brother who had been born in the same year as him.
He went to Uppsala to do a doctorate in molecular biology, on adenovirus proteins, and did something else on the side. Drawing on an earlier interest in Egyptology and knowing his supervisor would not approve, he enlisted an old Egyptology professor and worked at night and at weekends trying to extract DNA from Egyptian mummies. In 1985 he published it in Nature. It made his name. It was also, as the field later established, contamination from his own immune system experiments rather than ancient DNA at all.
What he did next is the reason he has a Nobel Prize. Instead of abandoning the idea, he spent years building the methods that would make it possible to tell a genuinely ancient molecule from a modern one, which is the whole technical foundation of the field. He founded the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig in 1997, announced a plan to sequence the Neanderthal genome in 2006 that most people thought unachievable, and completed a first draft in 2009. In March 2010 his group identified an entirely unknown kind of human, the Denisovans, from a single finger bone. On 3 October 2022 he received the Nobel Prize. His line is worth reading because the error is load bearing.
The moments
Svante Pääbo's timeline.
The 1980s
Mummy DNA, at night
Everyday, and it changed everything. His actual thesis was on virus proteins. The work he is remembered for was done in the hours around it, without permission.
A paper in Nature
Milestone, and it changed everything. A graduate student reporting DNA recovered from a mummy, in the most prominent journal there is.
A doctorate at Uppsala
Milestone. He completed the thesis he was supposed to be writing, in a subject he never returned to.
Drop the idea, or fix the method
Crossroads, decided.
The paths laid out: build the method properly, taken, or return to mainstream biology. The methods he built made the first Neanderthal genome possible in 2009 and the identification of the Denisovans in 2010, and brought the Nobel Prize in 2022.
The 1990s
It was his own contamination
Setback, and it changed everything. The result that made his name was not ancient DNA. It was his own laboratory, in the sample.
Founding a Leipzig institute
Milestone, and it changed everything. An institute built around a field that barely existed, and that he had partly discredited himself in.
The 2000s
A father, and a brother
Setback, and it changed everything. He had grown up outside his father's family. Both facts arrived in the same year, and only then.
He announced the Neanderthal plan
Milestone, and it changed everything. Most of the field thought it could not be done at all, on material that old and that degraded.
The first Neanderthal genome
Milestone, and it changed everything. The genome of a human species that has been extinct for forty thousand years, read.
The 2010s
A new kind of human
Milestone, and it changed everything. An entire previously unknown kind of human, found in a single fragment of finger bone and identified from its DNA.
The 2020s
The Nobel Prize
Milestone, and it changed everything. Forty years after his father received the same prize, and thirty seven years after the paper that was wrong.
Commander of the Polar Star
Milestone. His own country's honour, for a career mostly spent in Germany.
The line reaches today still adding to itself, which is why it is drawn now rather than at the end. What it has set moving is in most people reading this: a few per cent of Neanderthal DNA, which nobody knew was there until he worked out how to look.
What he wrote
Books by Svante Pääbo
- 2014
Neanderthal Man
Your turn
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Sources
- Svante Pääbo, English Wikipedia biography.
- The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2022, NobelPrize.org (facts and press release).
- Pääbo, Molecular cloning of Ancient Egyptian mummy DNA, Nature, 1985.
- Ancient DNA pioneer Svante Pääbo wins Nobel Prize, Science (AAAS), October 2022.
- An archaeologist of the genome: Svante Pääbo, Science in School, 2011.