I thought he was Finnish, judging by the last name, but according to Wikipedia, "Pääbo was born in Stockholm and grew up with his mother, Estonian chemist Karin Pääbo."

Also interesting, "His father was biochemist Sune Bergström, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Bengt I. Samuelsson and John R. Vane in 1982"

It's even more remarkable that Paabo never really had much of a relationship with his father but still managed to follow him in getting a Nobel Prize. Something to fuel nature-nurture debates...

Are you underestimating the choices of his mother and her capacity for creating an unprecedented intellectual atmosphere?

Please try not to be tedious. If you want to stir the pot, bring up the fact his mother selected a Nobel prize winner to have kids with, so clearly had bias, or something more creative.

Your statement leaves little doubt to my unsettling question, thanks for the clarity!

Or, I just pointed out that you went into the conversation with a boring assumption. It's transparent.

Yes yes, we know the problem.

so this guy had nature and nurture on his side, nice!

That is the clear and smart way of phrasing it, I did not have enough clarity to make the point, thanks!

Moral of the story : choose your parents wisely.

Karin Pääbo is a WW2 Estonian child refugee.

I had the similar pleasure of attending a Svante Pääbo lecture at Princeton. A bit after the Cell paper was published. The entire team seemed like scientists genuinely chagrined at the attention. Of course it should surprise no one that Neanderthal / Homo Sapiens "gene flow" would spark imaginations ;)

It's the Year 2022, and it appears we've evolved technologically to the point that Nobel calibre bioinformatics can be done on consumer laptops. It should be enough to literally calculate a personal Neanderthal / Denisovian admixture ratio on your own, provided you have access to your own sequence. With prices dropping on an Illumina machines, gene sequencers could be as ubiquitous as the PC shortly. Which, it's quite easy to see, results in the private sector human gene hacking industry, where humans in competitive play seek to "amp" their hominid characteristics for performance advantage ;)

https://github.com/PrincetonUniversity/IBDmix