 about receiving the Nobel Prize you mean at that minute yeah I was actually on the way out the door to pick up my daughter who had slept overnight at a friend's place so it was a holiday that day in Germany no school did you did you expect it were you surprised no I was totally surprised yes I somehow the feeling that this topic we do doesn't really fit anyway in the price categories and the feeling I wasn't even aware that it was announced that we granted really that came really that's not like you were waiting to see I was not waiting by the telephone no what do you think is the most useful kind of knowledge out of the Neanderthal gene that you've found like sequencing them in our research is really curiosity driven we in a way sometimes I say we we are just like archaeologists who make an excavation in a cave to see who lived here what happened here we make the excavation in the genome to sort of found out that we are very closely related to Neanderthals we found this distant relatives of Neanderthals the Denisovans that were in Asia and that these both these groups have contributed genetic variance to people today and that those variants still influence things the influence things like your ability in Tibet to live at high altitudes with a little oxygen atmosphere it that's a Denisovan variant and it influence things like your sense of pain your risk of miscarriages or how you deal with infectious diseases for example today are we closer to Neanderthals or Denisovan so Neanderthals and Denisovans are sister group so that so there was a common ancestor of modern humans Neanderthals and Denisovans about half a million years ago or 600,000 years ago and then about 400,000 years ago there is a separation of Neanderthals and Denisovans and all these groups mixed with each other when they met to where even in in this cave site Denisovan cave found the first generation offspring or girl whose father was Denisovan and the mother was Neanderthal so I was it that the Denisovan gene is about 0.2% in Asia and in Southeast Asia it's five well so the overall contribution to present a people it sort of adds up to be about two percent of our genome from everyone outside Africa come from Neanderthals and we have different pieces of the Neanderthal genome you and I would have different pieces then from Denisovans in mainland Asia it's about 0.2% or so and in Aboriginal Australians Papua New Guinea it's up to 5% do you have any hypothesis on why there it's a lot higher I think there's a separate sort of mixture that happened and one can also see that's in in Papua New Guinea for example is sort of more homogeneous Denisovan adnix here whereas in Japan for example there are at least two different Denisovan groups that contributed one of them is quite close to the genome the sequence and the other one is quite distant are there any other like applications into knowing the Neanderthal gene well there are a number of traits when it's aware of that are influenced by genetic variant that come from Neanderthals as you mentioned if you get infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus your risk of becoming severely ill is effective then Neanderthal there is one Neanderthal variant that makes it more likely that you become severely ill so it doesn't affect how likely you are to get infected but how sick you get and there is also another variant on another chromosome that actually makes it less likely to become severely ill there are also other things for example there is a variant of the progesterone receptor so that's a hormone that's important to prepare the uterus for pregnancies and that Neanderthal variant for that hormone receptor protects you against early miscarriages so there are a number of such variants that still exert very influenced today do you think that the world really understands like the public kind of grasps how amazing this is in general we are very lucky that the public is very interested in what we do already since many years and I do think we do the type of science that is quite easy to explain to people I think many people are quite fascinated about the idea that if your roots are in Asia or in Europe part of your ancestor are actually the Nisun and Neanderthals and that they have contributed a little bit to people who live today how do you keep your passion going for so long is it just something that you absolutely love to do well on one level yes it is sort of curiosity by yourself but it's also very much a group you know you have a team of students and postdocs and technicians that work on this and I think much of the enthusiasm is generated by the group among the people and I'm sort of carried along my role is often to work with the first draft of papers that others have written and then I think my enthusiasm is very much influenced by how good that first draft is I know if it is requires very much work I get less enthusiastic when when I can just sort of steer it a little and discuss the concepts and ideas rather than work on the grammar or presentation what will you be doing here at oyster so we are particularly interested in genetic changes that we can now identify on the modern human lineage so things that changed in a half million years since by the common ancestor with Neanderthals and Nisun and spreads to almost everyone who lives today and that's an interesting set of changes because it somehow defines presently humans as a biological group so we are studying those for example by putting such changes into mice and seeing how it influences the metabolism or behavior or the function of the brain and we sometimes put them also into cells so edit human cells back to the ancestral state and try to study the consequences of that so we're very happy to be in this environment where there are lots of good neurobiologists for example around is there anything special about the facility for example at least that kind of attracted you to come here yes it's really this but this is a large group of really good large place with many intergroups that are really really good particularly say in the area of neurobiology where we really need input because we are particularly interested in aspects of neurobiology but they're not neurobiologists ourselves in this interactive environment that has been created here is very sort of attractive to us and I guess the lack of department will help kind of communicate better among different researchers in Japan social and peer pressure is really strong what would you say to that you know people who kind of are afraid of not being normal and not going in the past that people usually take especially women I mean I would say that in general science is a sort of very anti-orthotarium enterprise it's almost helpful if a little bit you want to show that your boss is wrong and that what everyone thinks and what's in the textbook is wrong that is sort of a good sort of sort of what I say sort of stimulation or sort of thing trying to show that it is problematic if you have a very hierarchical structure where you're afraid of your boss if you're afraid to say something that may be stupid for example a good way to perhaps sort of work against that as a boss is to really ask the stupid questions yourself so you show that you know I don't know much more than you about this and when I don't understand something I ask and that's what we all have to do what is the number one or kind of like a rule of thumb advice you give to your PhD or graduate students I mean generally people wonder what they should do I tend to say you should do what you enjoy and what you find interesting it's generally you're generally automatically rather good at something you're interested in and enjoy you tend to not like things that you're bad at so and then at least you have a good time while you do it