Today, DNA stands for Daddy’s Nobel Acquired!
Bisexual scientist Svante Pääbo has won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The prestigious Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute bestowed the honor upon Pääbo “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution,” according to a press release issued on Wednesday.
More specifically, Pääbo was the first person to sequence the genome of the Neanderthal, the species from which modern humans are descended, a feat that was thought to be “seemingly impossible.” Additionally, he discovered a previously unknown human antecedent, Denisova, and found that gene transfer occurred between this species and ours around 70,000 years ago. While such connections may seem fairly distant, Pääbo also discovered in 2020 that humans with Neanderthal DNA carried an increased risk of severe COVID-19 symptoms.
All of this groundbreaking research led to the development of an entirely new field, paleogenomics, or the field of study that concerns the reconstruction of DNA of extinct species. “By revealing genetic differences that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominins, his discoveries provide the basis for exploring what makes us uniquely human,” the press release reads.
Reconstructing the DNA of long-dead species? Sounds kind of like the premise of Jurassic Park to us. But hey, if there was ever a movie that epitomized bisexual panic, it’s that one.
Pääbo came out publicly as bisexual in his 2014 book, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes. In a tale as old as time, he had his bisexual awakening at the University of California Berkeley. Although Pääbo previously assumed he was gay, he met fellow genetic scientist Dr. Linda Vigilant during a postdoctoral fellowship at the lauded Bay Area university, writing that he was attracted to her “boyish charms.”
Both Vigilant and Pääbo are researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, where they are also raising two children. Considering that LGBTQ+ people are generally less likely to work in STEM because of discrimination, harassment, and social exclusion, we’re totally here for Pääbo being the bisexual visibility that we need.
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