Svante Pääbo is a Swedish geneticist. In 2022, he became the first openly bi person to win the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, for “his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominids and human evolution”.
Pääbo was born in Stockholm in 1955. His mother, Karin Pääbo, was an Estonian chemist. His father, Sune Bergström, was a renowned scientist himself, and won the 1982 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Pääbo studied at Uppsala University, and graduated with a PhD in 1986.
Considered to be a founding figure of paleogenetics (the study of ancient beings through the microscopic remains of organisms), throughout his career Pääbo has been recognized for his significant and varied contributions to the study of human life. In 2007, he was named one of Time Magazine’s Top 100 Most Influential People to Watch, after announcing that he planned to reconstruct the entire genome of Neanderthals.
In his 2014 book Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes, Pääbo publicly came out as bi. Initially he thought he was gay, though realized he felt differently when he met fellow geneticist Linda Vigilant. The pair are married and reside in Leipzig, Germany, where they live with their two children. Whilst carrying out his own research, Pääbo works as an honorary lecturer at Leipzig University.