I am working on a collaborative proposal this morning which aims to address important questions by making use of paleogenomics, a field of science that reconstructs and analyzes genetic information from past ecosystems and organisms within them, and I just ran into a sentence in it that mentions Svante Pääbo by name. How cute, I thought, since I like proposals that recognize people and their contributions explicitly.
Probably some of you already know that the general consensus in life sciences is that Pääbo is one of the founders the field of paleogenomics, and he gained that recognition by developing molecular and analytical strategies that enabled the extraction and analysis of DNA from ancient specimens. This pushed the field to recognize something extremely important: DNA degrades over time, but it is not always completely lost, and a lot can be learned from it to learn about the past. And I have to mention that our group is particularly lucky here and is able to see the even horizon of paleogenomics first-hand thanks to Antonio Fernandez-Guerra, who works on improving computational approaches and their application to that kind of data and generously brings us closer to that field actively.
Going back to Pääbo, some of you may also know that it was Pääbo and his colleagues that revealed that most people of non-African descent carry up to 4% Neanderthal DNA in their genomes. A finding that essentially revolutionized our understanding of human evolution by showing that our journey in the quantum clouds of potential futures were much more complex back then compared to what people previously imagined, and multiple episodes of ‘interbreeding’ between different human species did take place in the past (funny fact, if you are reading this it means that someone in your family tree was there to see it happen).
Some of you may also know that Pääbo won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2022.
What you may NOT know yet, which was something I didn’t know until today, is that Svante Pääbo is actually the son of Sune Bergström (Svante Pääbo evidently took his mother’s last name), a biochemist who ALSO won a Nobel Prize in 1982 for the discovery of hormone-like substances known as prostaglandins and by demonstrating their crucial roles in inflammation, pain, and many other processes in the human body. An insight that enabled the emergence of new pain killers (like Ibuprofen and Aspirin) or labor inducers (like Dinoprostone) and other life-saving medications that millions of people use daily.
I am indeed procrastinating instead of working on the grant, and I really want to go back to it, BUT WHAT ARE THE CHANCES THAT YOU DO THAT, AND THEN HAVE A CHILD, WHO DOES SOMETHING COMPARABLE IN MAGNITUDE.
Both son and father winning Nobel prizes in entirely distinct disciplines is indeed quite an astonishing improbability, and it reminds me of the impact our families have on our trajectories. I think the Bergström-Pääbo story (and other dynasties of scientific explosions like the Curies, Braggs, or Bohrs of this world) shows that while individual brilliance matters enormously, it does not develop in isolation. Perhaps most of us can agree that we not only get our genes from our families but also the reasons to dream big.
We did not choose our families. But I will argue here that an extension of that family concept that nurtures us to reach farther is our immediate colleagues first, and after that the institutes where we work, and finally the scientific fields we choose to engage with, which we do get to choose. You may have missed the chance to come from a family of academics to get that initial boost, but you can still surround yourself with people who push you to reach farther, or at least don’t discourage you from trying. It is not too late.
On the one hand this all sounds very cheesy (even to me). But I think this framing is actually an effective way to assess whether you are at the right place given your aspirations in science, or whether it is time to move on to somewhere or someone else. Whether you should push harder to change your environment, or find or renew your peace with it. These are difficult questions, and a lot is at stake for each one of us at all times. But still.
So. Back to my own reality.
My plan is to think a little more about structures that enable breakthroughs, which of those structures we inherit, which ones we create, and which ones we influence.
After that I will go back to my grant. But before doing that I wanted to post this online to contribute to the pool of material for those of us who are looking for things to procrastinate but will not accept material that are not longer than a Tweet (speaking of Tweets, I also am on BlueSky :)).