This year, the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine goes to Svante Pääbo. One of his most important scientific successes was the decoding of the Neanderthal genome. "His work has revolutionised our understanding of the evolutionary history of modern man," said Martin Stratmann, President of the Max Planck Society. “Svante Pääbo, for example, demonstrated that Neanderthals and other extinct hominids made a significant contribution to the ancestry of modern man.”