Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Lecture 2022—The Neandertal Genome and the Evolution of Modern Humans

The actual lecture starts at the 13:00 point in the video, so jump there if you prefer to skip the preliminaries and introductions.

The entire talk is fascinating and illustrates how progress in DNA sequencing and bioinformatics have enabled research that was impossible not long ago. Particularly enlightening is the segment starting at the 38:00 mark where Dr Pääbo discusses how modern human genes which originated from interbreeding with Neandertal populations affect such matters as tolerance to pain, premature births and miscarriages, metabolism of drugs such as ibuprofen, mortality from coronavirus diseases, and more. This provides a genetic explanation for disparities between the population of sub-Saharan Africa, which has no admixture with Neandertal DNA and populations elsewhere, all of which have some Neandertal genes.

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