Svante Paabo’s father Sune Bergstrom won Nobel Prize in medicine in 1982

Sune Bergstrom, the father of Svante Paabo, won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1982. Paabo was declared the latest winner of the same award on Monday at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

Bergstrom, who was born in 1916, shared the prize with two other people — Bengt I. Samuelsson and John R. Vane. The award was divided equally among the three scientists. The award was given to them for “discoveries concerning prostaglandins and related biologically active substances”, the Nobel Foundation’s official website says.

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According to the Nobel Foundation, it’s the eighth time that the son or daughter of a Nobel laureate also won a Nobel Prize. Only once has a father-son duo shared the same Nobel Prize: in 1915 when Sir William Henry Bragg and his son William Laurence Bragg won the physics award together.

In an interview with the Nobel Foundation, Svante Paabo said that he was not close to his father but took interest in his work. His mother Karin Paabo was the biggest influence, he said.

Paabo won the Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for his discoveries on human evolution that provided key insights into our immune system and what makes us unique compared with our extinct cousins, the award’s panel said.

Paabo has spearheaded the development of new techniques that allowed researchers to compare the genome of modern humans and that of other hominins — the Neanderthals and Denisovans.

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“Svante Paabo has discovered the genetic make up of our closest relatives, the Neanderthals and the Denison hominins,” Nils-Göran Larsson, a Nobel Assembly member, told the Associated Press after the announcement.

“And the small differences between these extinct human forms and us as humans today will provide important insight into our body functions and how our brain has developed and so forth”, Larsson added.