The world has its first queer Nobel laureate!
The scientific community is eagerly awaiting the awarding of the Nobel Prize. This year, Swede Svante Pääbo has managed to claim the coveted prize in the category of medicine. Pääbo conducts research in Leipzig. His work has focused, among other things, on the life of the Neanderthal man and human evolution.
Another particularly interesting fact is that Svante Pääbo came out as bisexual in 2014. Accordingly, his success is also a particularly drastic experience for the community. After all, he is the first openly queer Nobel Prize winner ever!
(For the sake of completeness, it should be mentioned here that there have been queer people in the past who were able to enjoy this award. Unlike Pääbo, however, they did not openly live out their queerness).
Svante Pääbo's work in detail
Svante Pääbo conducts research on human evolution in Leipzig. He is also Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. In the past, he was the first researcher to sequence the Neanderthal genome. The conclusions he was able to draw from this are impressive.
On the basis of his research, Svante Pääbo was able to prove, among other things, that Neanderthals and modern humans must have met and reproduced. Put simply, it can be assumed that some humans still have a few genes from Neanderthals today. A groundbreaking discovery, for which Schwere was awarded the most important distinction for physicians. However, the award winner can look forward not only to fame and honor, but also to a considerable buzzer.
Because: The prize was endowed with the equivalent of more than 900,000 euros.
Svante Pääbo came out as bisexual in 2014
Who has dealt in the past a little more exactly with the history of Svante Pääbo, knows that the scientist is bisexual. He has already commented on this in his book, in which, by the way, he also examines the history of Neanderthals.
In addition to all the scientific findings, the book offers some private content. For example, the researcher wrote at the time that he had actually always suspected he was gay - until he met his current wife. They not only share a love for each other, but also a love for their work. She is also a scientist and the mother of his children.
What is the Nobel Prize?
The Nobel Prize is awarded every year (since 1901) on December 10. The prize, which is incidentally awarded in Sweden, is considered the highest honor that can be bestowed on a scientist. The Nobel Prize goes back to the scientist Alfred Nobel. He managed to harness the explosive power of nitroglycerine in the course of conducting several experiments. In a way, this was the birth of dynamite.
Nobel finally died in 1996. The Nobel Prize is awarded every year on the anniversary of his death. And that is exactly how he would have wanted it. In his will, he stipulated that part of his fortune should be used to organize an annual award ceremony. How carefully his plan was thought out was shown, among other things, by the fact that he is even the one who determined the categories in which the Nobel Prize is still awarded today.
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