Interview with the 2022 Nobel Prize laureate in physiology or medicine Svante Pääbo on 6 December 2022 during the Nobel Week in Stockholm, Sweden.

Where does your passion for science come from?

Svante Pääbo: I really don’t know where my passion from science comes from. I think my initial passion was much more for ancient history or archaeology here in Sweden where I grew up and for Egyptology after my mom took me to Egypt when I was 13 or 14 years old. Later I came to science and realised that one could fuse aspects of science with this interest for our past, both historical past events and evolutionary past events.

Was there a particular person who influenced you?

Svante Pääbo: I think the person that was most important to me when I grew up was clearly my mother since I grew up alone with my mother in a suburb of Stockholm. I think what was very important was that she had a sort of great respect and passion for schoolwork and learning and she took my nerdy interests very seriously when I got interested in ancient Vikings. She took me to the museum, she would take me around to look at runic stones around Stockholm and measure them and write up what was on them and so on. Then she took me to Egypt where I discovered a fascination of ancient Egypt. I think one thing that also my mother gave me was probably taking life as it comes because she had of course been uprooted by the second World War in Estonia and had to flee to Sweden and arrived here in 1944 when she was 18 years old or 19. Many, many of her classmates did not survive the war, so I think a little bit she took, but of every day as a gift, as I think all of us should do.

How important to teachers and a good learning environment.

Svante Pääbo: I grew up in Bagarmossen, a part of Stockholm where one at that time at least was not necessarily expected to go to university. I think it were a few teachers, for example, that were quite important to me. I remember a teacher of physics at Bergholmsskolan in Bagarmossen who also noticed my interest in ancient things, he collected antiquities and took some along and showed me at a school for example. This thing of feeling that your interests were taken seriously by your teachers was quite important. It’s important in a more research setting, I think, to try to have an atmosphere where everybody in the team can have ideas that they bring in, that you’re not afraid of saying something stupid or so that you realise that nine of ten ideas that come are probably wrong and stupid. But in order to get that 10th idea that’s really brilliant, you have to have an atmosphere where all the things are brought to the table, all ideas are expressed.

What qualities do you need to be a successful scientist?

Svante Pääbo: Of course hard to say what do you need to be a successful scientist because there are many different things that you need to come together perhaps, and there are also very different ways to being a successful scientist. There are some people that are extremely smart, for example, and that is important. There are other people that are very knowledgeable and really learn from what other people have done. There are people that bring together combinations of knowledge that otherwise no one brings together – that can be very fruitful. I think one cool thing with science is that there is not just one way to be a good scientist.

What do you enjoy about science?

Svante Pääbo: If you think about science, it’s of course driven, I think, by questions and interests you have, for example to see if we can go back in time and see how our genomes or DNA sequences have changed over time. But then once you endeavour on that, of course science is a collective effort. It’s very much a social thing where you work in a group, try to assemble the people with different competencies and make sure that these people get along with each other and that one can together work towards a goal. That’s in a way what I find probably most stimulating every day is this going together after something.

How are competition and collaboration related?

Svante Pääbo: Many people talk about competition in science and in some sense I don’t think that that’s an important factor. It’s a human enterprise. Competition comes into it of course, but it’s not the driving force for us. I thin. It’s really going after a question and competing with yourself in a way trying to do it as well and as quickly, of course, as you can.

What advice would you give to a student or young researcher?

Svante Pääbo: It is hard to say. What advice should you give to the younger scientists that enter the field? I think following your passion and your interests is important because it’s generally automatically the case that if you’re really interested in something, you tend to do it well just because you put in a lot of effort because you find it really interesting. You should follow the things that you are interested in, then at least you have a good time while you do it.

How do you cope with failure?

Svante Pääbo: Of course there are many challenges and failures and setbacks on the way. I think if you hold your gaze on what you want to achieve, you can overcome that rather rapidly because you only start thinking about the next experiment. What can you do to … You always live in the grand illusion that the next thing will solve everything that you do.

What are the key implications of your research?

Svante Pääbo: Our research is then curiosity driven if you like. We want to find out what happened to our ancestors in the past, so we have been able to study the genomes of our closest evolutionary relatives, Neandertals, and we discovered the distant relatives of Neandertals that lived in Asia, the Denisovans, and found that they contributed to the gene pool of people today. That many people today, if your roots are outside Africa, carry genetic variants that come from these earlier forms of humans and that these variants, genetic variants influence our biology today, influence our susceptibility to disease or our sense of pain or many other things.

What’s the relationship of Neandertals to modern humans?

Svante Pääbo: Now when we have the genome of our closest evolutionary relative, we can look for genetic changes that are unique to Neandertals and that are unique to fully modern humans that happened in our ancestors during the last half million years and spread to everybody or almost everybody today. We can have this catalogue of the genetic changes that make our genome unique. A research direction that is now becoming very exciting is to try to understand which of these may have functional consequences, which of these changes may influence things such as why modern humans became millions and eventually billions of people spread over the entire planet, spread over open oceans where you don’t see land on the other side, and came to a point today where we influence much of the biosphere.

What makes us uniquely human?

Svante Pääbo: One can of course ask what makes modern humans unique. That is these things, I think, that we, and not these other forms of humans, became very numerous, started having technology and culture that changed very rapidly and became so numerous that we probably just absorbed these earlier forms into our population. At least that’s probably a large part of why Neandertals, for example, disappeared, we are beginning to learn. I think the big question is to understand in the future what that may have been. It could have been even something more about sociality, that we have the ability to form big societies and transmit much of our knowledge to the next generation. That in reality humans are quite unique in that we spend almost the first third of our lives absorbing all the knowledge that previous generations have generated, and then we build on that. Some people talk about this ratchet effect that in each generation we develop our culture and technology further. I think somewhere there is probably in the future going to be the key what sets modern humans apart so much.

How did you celebrate the news of your Nobel Prize?

Svante Pääbo: There was an announcement of this in the beginning of October, it was a great surprise to me, I must say, and was a surprise, I think, to many people in our institute and to many people in the field. I think it feels so good also because it’s sort of a recognition of this entire research field. Yes, there was a lot of celebrations also in the institute immediately actually taking place. It was amazing how many people wrote to me, people from far back in my life that took this as an occasion to contact me again, and that was a lot of fun.

How is it returning to Stockholm to receive the prize

Svante Pääbo: Surprise, what should I say? Emotional to be back in the city that I grew up in. Unfortunately to say my mother is not around anymore to experience this. It’s of course an amazing feeling also to realise that exactly 40 years ago my father received the same prize here.

Will anything special happen when you return to Germany?

Svante Pääbo: When I have survived this week here, we will have a party for the institute at the oldest techno club in East Germany, actually, which is not far from our institute, The Distillery in Leipzig.

What environments help with creativity?

Svante Pääbo: An amazing thing in my career have been the opportunity that came in the mid-nineties to take part in the founding of this new Max Planck Institute in Leipzig in East Germany. There was a chance to think about how should one create an institute and how would or should one do anthropology in the future. The question that we united the institute from many, many disciplines that moved there was around what makes humans unique, indifferent, genetically, biologically, behaviourally, and so on. It was also a chance to create a building and an environment to bring people together. Of course, science is very international. Many people come from all over the world to work with us and have much of their life in the institute. I think it’s also seemed very important to have things like a sauna on the roof or a climbing wall or things you can do together – things that are not about the science – that you can do together to bring people to talk to each other, all to people from different disciplines that work in different departments.

Why is diversity of all kinds important in science?

Svante Pääbo: Often what is important for the progress of science is to bring different perspectives and opinions together. It can be very useful to bring people with different backgrounds and experiences together. It’s often in a combination of disciplines and knowledges that new things emerge. That said, I think it’s very important that each individual is very rooted in their own area of expertise and then interact with other fields, so to say. You have to be expert in something to appreciate what the other people do.

Can you tell us about the object that you’re donating to the Nobel Prize Museum?

Svante Pääbo: They of course want you to donate some object to the Nobel Prize Museum here. After some thought, I decided to give them two books, dictionaries of science that my father gave me in 1971 when I decided to not study science in school and rather go for Latin and ancient things. He was a little disappointed with that and gave me these books, I think to say I should keep at least an eye on science still. They remind me about that. Yes, that happened. I did come back to science and it’s a little link back to my dad also.

Watch the interview

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