Svante Pääbo is a Swedish geneticist who studies human and hominid DNA, and the first openly bisexual person in history to win a Nobel Prize.
Born in Stockhold, Sweden, in 1955, Pääbo came from parents with deep roots in science. His mother, Karin Pääbo, was an Estonian chemist and his father, Sune Bergström, was a renowned scientist who won the 1982 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Svante was raised primarily by his mother, who he later described as having nurtured his curiosity and intellectual interests from a young age. Following in his parents footsteps, Pääbo studied genetics at Uppsala University and graduated with a Ph.D. in 1986. He also served for one year in the Swedish Defense Forces.
Pääbo has been at the cutting edge of the study of ancient human genetics for nearly his entire career, leading almost every new discovery in the field. He became the founding director of the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in 1997. That same year, Pääbo and his team became the first to successfully extract, sequence, and analyze DNA from a 40,000-year-old Neanderthal, providing early evidence that Neanderthals were a distinct species from humans. He went on to lead the efforts to sequence the entire Neanderthal genome, analyze the DNA of other extinct human relatives, and uncover new discoveries about the “language gene”.
Considered to be a founding figure of modern paleogenetics — the genetic study of ancient DNA through the microscopic remains of organisms — 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 Neanderthal genome. In 2009, his team and collaborators completed the first draft of the genome, which entailed sequencing over 3 billion base pairs of Neanderthal DNA.
In 2022, Pääbo won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, for “his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominids and human evolution.” His scientific career has been recognized by an unbelievable series of honors and awards, including the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (1992), the Max Delbrück Medal (1998), the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine (2005), the Pour le Mérite (2008), the Kistler Prize (2009), the Great Cross of Merit with star (2009), the Gruber Prize in Genetics (2013), the Lomonosov Gold Medal (2014), the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2016), the Keio Medical Science Prize (2016), the Princess of Asturias Award (2018), the Körber European Science Prize (2018), the Darwin–Wallace Medal (2019), the Japan Prize (2020), and the Massry Prize (2021). In 2024, he was also awarded the Royal Order of the Polar Star, a Swedish honor similar to a British Knighthood.
In his 2014 book Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes, Pääbo publicly came out as bi. He wrote that he’d been almost entirely same-sex attracted up through middle age and always assumed he was gay, but that changed when he met his now-wife, the geneticist and primatologist Linda Vigilant. Her scientific brilliance, along with her “boyish” looks and charms, shifted the way he thought about his own sexuality. The couple married in 2008 and reside in Leipzig, Germany, where they live with their two children. While carrying out his own research, Pääbo works as an honorary lecturer at Leipzig University. Upon winning his Nobel Prize in 2022, he became the first openly bi Nobel laureate in history.