The top 10 books on the Apple Store for week ending 10/09/2022
Tag: Books and literature
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Books on empire, migrant crisis up for Baillie Gifford prize
LONDON — Books about Britain’s imperial past and the human face of the present-day refugee crisis are among the finalists for Britain’s leading nonfiction book award, the Baillie Gifford Prize.
The shortlist announced Monday includes Harvard professor Caroline Elkins’ hard-hitting “Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire” and Irish journalist Sally Hayden’s “My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route.”
Four books by British writers are also among the finalists for the 50,000 pound ($55,000) prize.
They are Jonathan Freedland’s true Holocaust story “The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World;” Anna Keay’s “The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown,” which charts Britain’s brief period as a republic in the 17th century; Polly Morland’s “A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story;” and Katherine Rundell’s poetic biography “Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne.”
Journalist Caroline Sanderson, who is chairing the judging panel, said the six books “are marvelously wide-ranging, in terms of setting, era, and the creative approaches on display. But however different the canvas, all have enthralling human stories at their heart.”
The Baillie Gifford Prize recognizes English-language books from any country in current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts.
Last year’s winner was Patrick Radden Keefe’s “Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty,” an expose of the family that helped unleash the United States’ opioid epidemic.
The winner of the 2022 prize will be announced on Nov. 17 at a ceremony in London.
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Former Fed chair Bernanke shares Nobel for research on banks
STOCKHOLM — Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke, who put his academic expertise on the Great Depression to work reviving the American economy after the 2007-2008 financial crisis, won the Nobel Prize in economic sciences along with two other U.S.-based economists for their research into the fallout from bank failures.
Bernanke was recognized Monday along with Douglas W. Diamond and Philip H. Dybvig. The Nobel panel at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm said the trio’s research had shown “why avoiding bank collapses is vital.”
With their findings in the early 1980s, the laureates laid the foundations for regulating financial markets and dealing with financial crises, the panel said.
Bernanke, 68, now with the Brookings Institution in Washington, examined the Great Depression of the 1930s, showing the danger of bank runs — when panicked savers withdraw their deposits.
Diamond, 68, based at the University of Chicago, and Dybvig, 67, who is at Washington University in St. Louis, showed how government guarantees on deposits can prevent a spiraling of financial crises.
“The laureates’ insights have improved our ability to avoid both serious crises and expensive bailouts,” said Tore Ellingsen, chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences.
Their research took on great real-world significance when investors sent the financial system into a panic during fall 2008.
Bernanke, then head of the Fed, teamed up with the U.S. Treasury Department to prop up major banks and ease a shortage of credit, the lifeblood of the economy.
He slashed short-term interest rates to zero, directed the Fed’s purchases of Treasury and mortgage investments and set up unprecedented lending programs. Collectively, those steps calmed investors and fortified big banks.
They also pushed long-term interest rates to historic lows and led to fierce criticism of Bernanke, particularly from some 2012 Republican presidential candidates, that the Fed was hurting the value of the dollar and running the risk of igniting inflation later.
The Fed’s actions under Bernanke extended the authority of the central bank into unprecedented territory. They weren’t able to prevent the longest and most painful recession since the 1930s. But in hindsight, the Fed’s moves were credited with rescuing the banking system and avoiding another depression.
And Bernanke’s Fed established a precedent for the central bank to respond with speed and force to economic shocks.
When COVID-19 slammed the U.S. economy in early 2020, the Fed, under Chair Jerome Powell, quickly cut short-term interest rates back to zero and pumped money into the financial system. The aggressive intervention — along with massive government spending — quickly ended the downturn and triggered a powerful economic recovery.
But the quick comeback also came at a cost: Inflation began rising rapidly last year and now is close to 40-year highs, forcing the Fed to reverse course and raise rates to cool the economy. Central banks around the world also are taking the steps as inflation erodes consumers’ spending power.
Nobel prizes carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) and will be handed out on Dec. 10.
Unlike the other prizes, the economics award wasn’t established in Alfred Nobel’s will of 1895 but by the Swedish central bank in his memory. The first winner was selected in 1969.
Last year, half of the award went to David Card for his research on how the minimum wage, immigration and education affect the labor market. The other half was shared by Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens for proposing how to study issues that don’t easily fit traditional scientific methods.
A week of Nobel Prize announcements kicked off Oct. 3 with Swedish scientist Svante Paabo receiving the award in medicine for unlocking secrets of Neanderthal DNA that provided key insights into our immune system.
Three scientists jointly won the prize in physics Tuesday. Frenchman Alain Aspect, American John F. Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger had shown that tiny particles can retain a connection with each other even when separated, a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement, that can be used for specialized computing and to encrypt information.
The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday to Americans Carolyn R. Bertozzi and K. Barry Sharpless, and Danish scientist Morten Meldal for developing a way of “snapping molecules together” that can be used to explore cells, map DNA and design drugs that can target diseases such as cancer more precisely.
French author Annie Ernaux won this year’s Nobel Prize in literature Thursday. The panel commended her for blending fiction and autobiography in books that fearlessly mine her experiences as a working-class woman to explore life in France since the 1940s.
The Nobel Peace Prize went to jailed Belarus human rights activist Ales Bialiatski, the Russian group Memorial and the Ukrainian organization Center for Civil Liberties on Friday.
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Jordans reported from Berlin and Wiseman from Washington.
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Follow all AP stories about the Nobel Prizes at https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes
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Vegas showgirls describe shock of stabbings that left 2 dead
LAS VEGAS — Victims of a quick series of stabbings on the Las Vegas Strip described the shock and horror of the unexpected attack on a group of showgirls and others outside a casino that left two people dead and six injured.
Police arrested Yoni Barrios, 32, after a short chase blocks from where they say he attacked four showgirls and ended up stabbing eight people on Thursday.
An arrest report released Friday said Barrios told police some of the victims had laughed at him and he “let the anger out.” Prosecutors say he’ll be charged with two counts of murder and six counts of attempted murder.
“I couldn’t believe that this was happening to me,” said Victoria Caytano, one of the showgirl impersonators who was released from the hospital Friday after she was treated for a stab wound.
“I got up, and I started running,” Caytano told KLAS-TV. “I started yelling, ‘he has a knife!’”
The coroner’s office identified those killed as Las Vegas residents Brent Allan Hallett, 47, and Maris Mareen DiGiovanni, 30. Hallett was stabbed in the back and DiGiovanni died from a chest wound, authorities said.
DiGiovanni was part of the Best Showgirls In Vegas modeling and talent agency, according to Cheryl Lowthorp, who runs the business. She said two others with the agency were among the wounded and a third escaped without injury.
According to the police report, some performers said he made them feel uncomfortable when he approached for a photo and one backed away. One woman said he stabbed her in the back, then stabbed DiGiovanni.
Anna Westby, who suffered a punctured lung, said she and Caytano were with DiGiovanni when Barrios attacked them.
“I’m screaming, asking everyone for help,” she told KLAS-TV. “He caught up to me, and he stabbed me in the back and then he ran off.”
Best Showgirls In Vegas provides models and showgirls for various promotional events from restaurant openings to airport greetings. In her 12 years operating the agency, Lowthrop said the models have pretty much gone day to day “without incident.”
“This is a safe job, there are cops everywhere,” Lowthorp said. “No place is filmed more than the Las Vegas Strip.”
The police report said Barrios was covered in blood when he was arrested. Officers seized a large, long-bladed knife, the report said.
Barrios told one victim “sorry, man” before stabbing him in the back and also said that he hoped police would shoot him, the report said.
It wasn’t immediately known whether Barrios had a lawyer who could comment on his behalf. He made his initial court appearance on Friday was ordered held without bail. An initial arraignment was scheduled for Tuesday.
Barrios had an address in Los Angeles, told police that he came to Las Vegas two days earlier to move in with a friend who then refused to let him stay at the house, so he packed his things and took a bus to the Las Vegas Strip, according to the arrest report.
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Vegas showgirls describe shock of stabbings that left 2 dead
LAS VEGAS — Victims of a quick series of stabbings on the Las Vegas Strip described the shock and horror of the unexpected attack on a group of showgirls and others outside a casino that left two people dead and six injured.
Police arrested Yoni Barrios, 32, after a short chase blocks from where they say he attacked four showgirls and ended up stabbing eight people on Thursday.
An arrest report released Friday said Barrios told police some of the victims had laughed at him and he “let the anger out.” Prosecutors say he’ll be charged with two counts of murder and six counts of attempted murder.
“I couldn’t believe that this was happening to me,” said Victoria Caytano, one of the showgirl impersonators who was released from the hospital Friday after she was treated for a stab wound.
“I got up, and I started running,” Caytano told KLAS-TV. “I started yelling, ‘he has a knife!’”
The coroner’s office identified those killed as Las Vegas residents Brent Allan Hallett, 47, and Maris Mareen DiGiovanni, 30. Hallett was stabbed in the back and DiGiovanni died from a chest wound, authorities said.
DiGiovanni was part of the Best Showgirls In Vegas modeling and talent agency, according to Cheryl Lowthorp, who runs the business. She said two others with the agency were among the wounded and a third escaped without injury.
According to the police report, some performers said he made them feel uncomfortable when he approached for a photo and one backed away. One woman said he stabbed her in the back, then stabbed DiGiovanni.
Anna Westby, who suffered a punctured lung, said she and Caytano were with DiGiovanni when Barrios attacked them.
“I’m screaming, asking everyone for help,” she told KLAS-TV. “He caught up to me, and he stabbed me in the back and then he ran off.”
Best Showgirls In Vegas provides models and showgirls for various promotional events from restaurant openings to airport greetings. In her 12 years operating the agency, Lowthrop said the models have pretty much gone day to day “without incident.”
“This is a safe job, there are cops everywhere,” Lowthorp said. “No place is filmed more than the Las Vegas Strip.”
The police report said Barrios was covered in blood when he was arrested. Officers seized a large, long-bladed knife, the report said.
Barrios told one victim “sorry, man” before stabbing him in the back and also said that he hoped police would shoot him, the report said.
It wasn’t immediately known whether Barrios had a lawyer who could comment on his behalf. He made his initial court appearance on Friday was ordered held without bail. An initial arraignment was scheduled for Tuesday.
Barrios had an address in Los Angeles, told police that he came to Las Vegas two days earlier to move in with a friend who then refused to let him stay at the house, so he packed his things and took a bus to the Las Vegas Strip, according to the arrest report.
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French writer Annie Ernaux awarded Nobel Prize in literature
STOCKHOLM — French author Annie Ernaux, who has fearlessly mined her own biography to explore life in France since the 1940s, won this year’s Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for work that illuminates murky corners of memory, family and society.
Ernaux ‘s books probe deeply personal experiences and feelings – love, sex, abortion, shame – within a society split by gender and class divisions. The Swedish Academy said Ernaux, 82, was recognized for “the courage and clinical acuity” of books rooted in her background in a working-class family in the Normandy region of northwest France.
Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel literature committee, said Ernaux is “an extremely honest writer who is not afraid to confront the hard truths.”
“She writes about things that no one else writes about, for instance her abortion, her jealousy, her experiences as an abandoned lover and so forth. I mean, really hard experiences,” he told The Associated Press after the award announcement in Stockholm. “And she gives words for these experiences that are very simple and striking. They are short books, but they are really moving.”
One of France’s most-garlanded authors and a prominent feminist voice, Ernaux said she was happy to have won the prize, which carries a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) — but “not bowled over.”
“I am very happy, I am proud. Voila, that’s all,” Ernaux said in brief remarks to journalists outside her home in Cergy, a town west of Paris that she has written about.
French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted: “Annie Ernaux has been writing for 50 years the novel of the collective and intimate memory of our country. Her voice is that of women’s freedom, and the century’s forgotten ones.”
While Macron praised Ernaux for her Nobel, she has been unsparing with him. A supporter of left-wing causes for social justice, she has poured scorn on Macron’s background in banking and said his first term as president failed to advance the cause of French women.
Ernaux is the first female French Nobel literature winner and just the 17th woman among the 119 Nobel literature laureates. More than a dozen French writers have received the literature prize since Sully Prudhomme won the inaugural award in 1901. The most recent French winner before Ernaux was Patrick Modiano in 2014.
Her more than 20 books, most of them very short, chronicle events in her life and the lives of those around her. They present uncompromising portraits of sexual encounters, abortion, illness and the deaths of her parents.
Olsson said Ernaux’s work was often “written in plain language, scraped clean.” He said she had used the term “an ethnologist of herself” rather than a writer of fiction.
Ernaux worked as a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. Her first book was “Cleaned Out” in 1974. Two more autobiographical novels followed – “What They Say Goes” and “The Frozen Woman” – before she moved to more overtly autobiographical books.
In the book that made her name, “A Man’s Place,” published in 1983 and about her relationship with her father, she writes: “No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony. This neutral writing style comes to me naturally.”
“Shame,” published in 1997, explored a childhood trauma, while “Happening,” from 2000 depicts an illegal abortion.
Her most critically acclaimed book is “The Years,” published in 2008, which described herself and wider French society from the end of World War II to the 21st century. Unlike in previous books, in “The Years,” Ernaux wrote in the third person, calling her character “she” rather than “I.” The book received numerous awards and honors, and Olsson said it has been called “the first collective autobiography.”
“A Girl’s Story,” from 2016, follows a young woman’s coming of age in the 1950s.
The literature prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers, as well as too male-dominated. Last year’s prize winner, Tanzanian-born, U.K.-based writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, was only the sixth Nobel literature laureate born in Africa.
Olsson said the academy was working to diversify its range, drawing on experts in literature from different regions and languages.
“We try to broaden the concept of literature but it is the quality that counts, ultimately,” he said.
The prizes to Gurnah in 2021 and U.S. poet Louise Glück in 2020 helped the literature prize move on from years of controversy and scandal.
In 2018, the award was postponed after sex abuse allegations rocked the Swedish Academy, which names the Nobel literature committee, and sparked an exodus of members. The academy revamped itself but faced more criticism for giving the 2019 literature award to Austria’s Peter Handke, who has been called an apologist for Serbian war crimes.
A week of Nobel Prize announcements kicked off Monday with Swedish scientist Svante Paabo receiving the award in medicine for unlocking secrets of Neanderthal DNA that provided key insights into our immune system.
Three scientists jointly won the prize in physics Tuesday. Frenchman Alain Aspect, American John F. Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger had shown that tiny particles can retain a connection with each other even when separated, a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement, that can be used for specialized computing and to encrypt information.
The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday to Americans Carolyn R. Bertozzi and K. Barry Sharpless, and Danish scientist Morten Meldal for developing a way of “snapping molecules together” that can be used to explore cells, map DNA and design drugs that can target diseases such as cancer more precisely.
The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on Monday.
The prizes will be handed out on Dec. 10. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, in 1895.
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Macpherson reported from Clergy, France and Lawless from London. John Leicester in Le Pecq, France, Frank Jordans in Berlin, Naomi Koppel in London, Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed.
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Loretta Lynn, coal miner’s daughter and country queen, dies
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Loretta Lynn, the Kentucky coal miner’s daughter whose frank songs about life and love as a woman in Appalachia pulled her out of poverty and made her a pillar of country music, has died. She was 90.
In a statement provided to The Associated Press, Lynn’s family said she died Tuesday at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee.
“Our precious mom, Loretta Lynn, passed away peacefully this morning, October 4th, in her sleep at home in her beloved ranch in Hurricane Mills,” the family said in a statement. They asked for privacy as they grieve and said a memorial will be announced later.
Lynn already had four children before launching her career in the early 1960s, and her songs reflected her pride in her rural Kentucky background.
As a songwriter, she crafted a persona of a defiantly tough woman, a contrast to the stereotypical image of most female country singers. The Country Music Hall of Famer wrote fearlessly about sex and love, cheating husbands, divorce and birth control and sometimes got in trouble with radio programmers for material from which even rock performers once shied away.
Her biggest hits came in the 1960s and ’70s, including “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “You Ain’t Woman Enough,” “The Pill,” “Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” “Rated X” and “You’re Looking at Country.” She was known for appearing in floor-length, wide gowns with elaborate embroidery or rhinestones, many created by her longtime personal assistant and designer Tim Cobb.
Her honesty and unique place in country music was rewarded. She was the first woman ever named entertainer of the year at the genre’s two major awards shows, first by the Country Music Association in 1972 and then by the Academy of Country Music three years later.
“It was what I wanted to hear and what I knew other women wanted to hear, too,” Lynn told the AP in 2016. “I didn’t write for the men; I wrote for us women. And the men loved it, too.”
In 1969, she released her autobiographical “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” which helped her reach her widest audience yet.
“We were poor but we had love/That’s the one thing Daddy made sure of/He shoveled coal to make a poor man’s dollar,” she sang.
“Coal Miner’s Daughter,” also the title of her 1976 book, was made into a 1980 movie of the same name. Sissy Spacek’s portrayal of Lynn won her an Academy Award and the film was also nominated for best picture.
Long after her commercial peak, Lynn won two Grammys in 2005 for her album “Van Lear Rose,” which featured 13 songs she wrote, including “Portland, Oregon” about a drunken one-night stand. “Van Lear Rose” was a collaboration with rocker Jack White, who produced the album and played the guitar parts.
Reba McEntire was among the stars who reacted to Lynn’s death, posting online about how the singer reminded her of her late mother. “Strong women, who loved their children and were fiercely loyal. Now they’re both in Heaven getting to visit and talk about how they were raised, how different country music is now from what it was when they were young. Sure makes me feel good that Mama went first so she could welcome Loretta into the hollers of heaven!”
Born Loretta Webb, the second of eight children, she claimed her birthplace was Butcher Holler, near the coal mining company town of Van Lear in the mountains of east Kentucky. There really wasn’t a Butcher Holler, however. She later told a reporter that she made up the name for the purposes of the song based on the names of the families that lived there.
Her daddy played the banjo, her mama played the guitar and she grew up on the songs of the Carter Family. Her younger sister, Crystal Gayle, is also a Grammy-winning country singer, scoring crossover hits with songs like “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” and “Half the Way.” Lynn’s daughter Patsy Lynn Russell also was a songwriter and producer of some of her albums.
“I was singing when I was born, I think,” she told the AP in 2016. “Daddy used to come out on the porch where I would be singing and rocking the babies to sleep. He’d say, ‘Loretta, shut that big mouth. People all over this holler can hear you.’ And I said, ‘Daddy, what difference does it make? They are all my cousins.’”
She wrote in her autobiography that she was 13 when she got married to Oliver “Mooney” Lynn, but the AP later discovered state records that showed she was 15. Tommy Lee Jones played Mooney Lynn in the biopic.
Her husband, whom she called “Doo” or “Doolittle,” urged her to sing professionally and helped promote her early career. With his help, she earned a recording contract with Decca Records, later MCA, and performed on the Grand Ole Opry stage. Lynn wrote her first hit single, “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl,” released in 1960.
She also teamed up with singer Conway Twitty to form one of the most popular duos in country music with hits such as “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man” and “After the Fire is Gone,” which earned them a Grammy Award. Their duets, and her single records, were always mainstream country and not crossover or pop-tinged.
And when she first started singing at the Grand Ole Opry, country star Patsy Cline took Lynn under her wing and mentored her during her early career.
The Academy of Country Music chose her as the artist of the decade for the 1970s, and she was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988. She won four Grammy Awards, was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2008, was honored at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2003 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.
In “Fist City,” Lynn threatens a hair-pulling fistfight if another woman won’t stay away from her man: “I’m here to tell you, gal, to lay off of my man/If you don’t want to go to Fist City.” That strong-willed but traditional country woman reappears in other Lynn songs. In “The Pill,” a song about sex and birth control, Lynn sings about how she’s sick of being trapped at home to take care of babies: “The feelin’ good comes easy now/Since I’ve got the pill,” she sang.
She moved to Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, outside of Nashville, in the 1990s, where she set up a ranch complete with a replica of her childhood home and a museum that is a popular roadside tourist stop. The dresses she was known for wearing are there, too.
Lynn knew that her songs were trailblazing, especially for country music, but she was just writing the truth that so many rural women like her experienced.
“I could see that other women was goin’ through the same thing, ‘cause I worked the clubs. I wasn’t the only one that was livin’ that life and I’m not the only one that’s gonna be livin’ today what I’m writin’,” she told The AP in 1995.
Even into her later years, Lynn never seemed to stop writing, scoring a multi-album deal in 2014 with Legacy Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment. In 2017, she suffered a stroke that forced her to stop touring, but she released her 50th solo studio album, “Still Woman Enough” in 2021.
She and her husband were married nearly 50 years before he died in 1996. They had six children: Betty, Jack, Ernest and Clara, and then twins Patsy and Peggy. She had 17 grandchildren and four step-grandchildren.
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Online: https://lorettalynn.com/
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Follow Kristin M. Hall at https://twitter.com/kmhall
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Nobel win for Swede who unlocked secrets of Neanderthal DNA
STOCKHOLM — Swedish scientist Svante 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 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.
While Neanderthal bones were first discovered in the mid-19th century, only by unlocking their DNA — often referred to as the code of life — have scientists been able to fully understand the links between species.
This included the time when modern humans and Neanderthals diverged as a species, determined to be around 800,000 years ago, said Anna Wedell, chair of the Nobel Committee.
“Paabo and his team also surprisingly found that gene flow had occurred from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens, demonstrating that they had children together during periods of co-existence,” she said.
This transfer of genes between hominin species affects how the immune system of modern humans reacts to infections, such as the coronavirus. People outside Africa have 1-2% of Neanderthal genes.
Paabo and his team also managed to extract DNA from a tiny finger bone found in a cave in Siberia, leading to the recognition of a new species of ancient humans they called Denisovans.
Wedell described this as “a sensational discovery” that subsequently showed Neanderthals and Denisovan to be sister groups which split from each other around 600,000 years ago. Denisovan genes have been found in up to 6% of modern humans in Asia and Southeast Asia, indicating that interbreeding occurred there too.
“By mixing with them after migrating out of Africa, homo sapiens picked up sequences that improved their chances to survive in their new environments,” said Wedell. For example, Tibetans share a gene with Denisovans that helps them adapt to the high altitude.
“Svante Pääbo 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.”
Paabo said he was surprised to learn of his win on Monday.
“So I was just gulping down the last cup of tea to go and pick up my daughter at her nanny where she has had an overnight stay, and then I got this call from Sweden and I of course thought it had something to do with our little summer house in Sweden. I thought, ‘Oh the lawn mower’s broken down or something,’” he said in an interview posted on the official home page of the Nobel Prizes.
He mused about what would have happened if Neanderthals had survived another 40,000 years. “Would we see even worse racism against Neanderthals, because they were really in some sense different from us? Or would we actually see our place in the living world quite in a different way when we would have other forms of humans there that are very like us but still different,” he said.
Paabo, 67, performed his prizewinning studies in Germany at the University of Munich and at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He is the son of Sune Bergstrom, who won the Nobel prize in medicine in 1982. According to the Nobel Foundation, it’s the eighth time that the son or daughter of a Nobel laureate also won a Nobel Prize.
Scientists in the field lauded the Nobel Committee’s choice this year.
David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, said he was thrilled the group honored the field of ancient DNA, which he worried might “fall between the cracks.”
By recognizing that DNA can be preserved for tens of thousands of years — and developing ways to extract it — Paabo and his team created a completely new way to answer questions about our past, Reich said. That work was the basis for an “explosive growth” of ancient DNA studies in recent decades.
“It’s totally reconfigured our understanding of human variation and human history,” Reich said.
Dr. Eric Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, called it “a great day for genomics,” a relatively young field first named in 1987.
The Human Genome project, which ran from 1990-2003, “got us the first sequence of the human genome, and we’ve improved that sequence ever since,” Green said. Since then, scientists developed new cheaper, extremely sensitive methods for sequencing DNA.
When you sequence DNA from a fossil millions of years old, you only have “vanishingly small amounts” of DNA, Green said. Among Paabo’s innovations was figuring out the laboratory methods for extracting and preserving these tiny amounts of DNA. He was then able to lay pieces of the Neanderthal genome sequence against the human sequencing coming out of the Human Genome Project.
Paabo’s team published the first draft of a Neanderthal genome in 2009. The team sequenced more than 60% of the full genome from a small sample of bone, after contending with decay and contamination from bacteria.
“We should always be proud of the fact that we sequenced our genome. But the idea that we can go back in time and sequence the genome that doesn’t live anymore and something that’s a direct relative of humans is truly remarkable,” Green said.
Katerina Harvati-Papatheodorou, professor of paleoanthropology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, said the award also underscores the importance of understanding humanity’s evolutionary heritage to gain insights about human health today.
“The most recent example is the finding that genes inherited from our Neanderthal relatives … can have implications for one’s susceptibility to COVID infections,” she said in an email to the AP.
The medicine prize kicked off a week of Nobel Prize announcements. It continues Tuesday with the physics prize, with chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on Oct. 10.
Last year’s medicine recipients were David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries into how the human body perceives temperature and touch.
The prizes carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) and will be handed out on Dec. 10. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.
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Jordans reported from Berlin. Ungar reported from Louisville, Kentucky. Maddie Burakoff contributed from New York.
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Follow all AP stories about the Nobel Prizes at https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes
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Nobel season is here: 5 things to know about the prizes
COPENHAGEN, Denmark — The beginning of October means Nobel Prize season. Six days, six prizes, new faces from around the globe added to the world’s most elite roster of scientists, writers, economists and human rights leaders.
This year’s Nobel season kicks off Monday with the medicine award, followed by daily announcements: physics on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on Oct. 10.
Here are five other things to know about the coveted prizes:
WHO CREATED THE NOBEL PRIZES?
The prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace were established by the will of Alfred Nobel, a wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite. The first awards were handed out in 1901, five years after Nobel’s death.
Each prize is worth 10 million kronor (nearly $900,000) and will be handed out with a diploma and gold medal on Dec. 10 — the date of Nobel’s death in 1896.
The economics award — officially known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel — wasn’t created by Nobel, but by Sweden’s central bank in 1968.
Between 1901 and 2021, the Nobel Prizes and the prize in economic sciences have been awarded 609 times.
WHO KNOWS WHO WILL WIN AND WHY?
The Nobel statutes prohibit the judges from discussing their deliberations for 50 years. So it’s probably going to be a while before we know for sure how judges made their picks for 2022 and who was on their short lists.
The judges try hard to avoid dropping hints about the winners before the announcements, but sometimes word gets out. Bookies in Europe sometimes offer odds on possible peace prize and literature Nobel winners.
WHO CAN NOMINATE A CANDIDATE?
Thousands of people around the world are eligible to submit nominations for the Nobel Prizes.
They include university professors, lawmakers, previous Nobel laureates and the committee members themselves.
Although the nominations are kept secret for 50 years, those who submit them sometimes announce their suggestions publicly, particularly for the Nobel Peace Prize.
WHAT ABOUT THE NORWEGIAN CONNECTION?
The Nobel Peace Prize is presented in Norway while the other awards are handed out in Sweden. That’s how Alfred Nobel wanted it.
His exact reasons are unclear but during his lifetime Sweden and Norway were joined in a union, which was dissolved in 1905. Sometimes relations have been tense between the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, which manages the prize money, and the fiercely independent peace prize committee in Oslo.
WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO WIN A NOBEL?
Patience, for one.
Scientists often have to wait decades to have their work recognized by the Nobel judges, who want to make sure that any breakthrough withstands the test of time.
That’s a departure from Nobel’s will, which states that the awards should endow “those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.” The peace prize committee is the only one that regularly rewards achievements made in the previous year.
According to Nobel’s wishes, that prize should go to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
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