\u200bOn any other day, Svante P\u00e4\u00e4bo would have been in his laboratory in the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. However, since the 3rd of October is a holiday to celebrate West Germany’s reconciliation with East Germany, the man who\u2019d dedicated his life to reconciling humankind\u2019s genes with our hominid ancestors was at home. As a result when he got \u2018the call\u2019 from a Swedish number he thought \u201cit had something to do with our little summer house in Sweden… the lawn mower\u2019s broken down or something\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u200bThe call of course was to inform Svante that he had won the 2022 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.\u200b
Svante isn\u2019t the first from his Swedish home to have been awarded a Nobel. His father Sube Bergstrom is a Nobel laureate as well. Yet it\u2019s his mother that Svante accredits more of his success to. \u201cI think the biggest influence in my life was for sure my mother, with whom I grew up. And in some sense it makes me a bit sad that she can\u2019t experience this day.\u201d But there was a valuable lesson that he did learn from his father \u201c’Such people’ by which he probably means, the obsessive truth seeking breed of scientists “are normal human beings.\u201d \u200b
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That definition of normal of course is one that Svante has managed to push in his own lifetime. <\/p>\n\n\n\n