Swedish geneticist Svante Paabo who won Nobel Prize in Medicine this year celebrated the feat in a rather fun way.
After being named the Nobel Prize laureate for his discoveries ‘concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution’, Paabo celebrated the achievement with his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute.
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A video recorded by one of his fellow researchers, Benjamin Vernot, has emerged on the internet and sees the laureate being thrown in the pond by his colleagues as an act of celebration, while loud cheers followed. One of his colleagues later helped Paabo with a safety ring in the pool.
Sharing the short clip on social media, the Nobel Prize organization wrote, “Our new medicine laureate Svante Pääbo made a splash when his colleagues at Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany threw him into a pond.”
It was also noted that the tradition is usually carried out to celebrate when a person receives a PhD, however, the team at Max Plank Institute decided to do it for the Nobel Prize of Paabo as well.
Paabo, son of the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Sune Bergström, has been credited with transforming the study of human origins after developing approaches to allow for the examination of DNA sequences from archaeological and paleontological remains.
His key achievements include sequencing an entire Neanderthal genome to reveal the link between extinct people and modern humans.
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He also brought to light the existence of a previously unknown human species called the Denisovans, from a 40,000-year-old fragment of a finger bone discovered in Siberia.
Svante Pääbo’s most cited paper in the Web of Science was published in 1989, with 4,077 citations.
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