There goes my explanation because they call me for no reason
In Medicine and four decades after it was won by his father, Sune Bergström, who led a double life and two families for years.
Every Saturday, the professor of biochemistry Sune Bergstrm he says goodbye to his family -wife and son- and leaves the house to go to work. The professor, however, did not go to his laboratory at the prestigious Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, but instead visited an apartment in the then not very recommendable suburb of Bagarmossen, popularly known as Bagis. There they waited for him, every Saturday, Karin Pbo, the Estonian lab assistant who had been his lover, and the son they had together, Svante.
Bergström wore that double life during throughout the child’s childhood and adolescence. Between visit and visit, he still had time to win the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1982. Now, just four decades later, Svante Pbo just received itwho is not the first son of a previous awardee to whom the illustrious award is granted -there are seven precedents- but he is the first secret son who repeats the paternal success.
A Pbo, paleogenetista 67 years old, he was rewarded for map the DNAof two prehistoric human species, the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. His father won the Prize at almost the same age, 66, for his discoveries concerning prostaglandins and related substances. The following year he was appointed president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
The father-son relationship between the two was peculiar to say the least. Karin, the mother, came to Sweden from Estonia in 1944 as a war refugee. I worked modest jobs to be able to pay for college until she graduated as a chemist. It was then that she started working as laboratory assistant at the Karolinska and met the professor. The extramarital affair ended in pregnancy.
It must have been a period when Bergström was especially active. Svante and Rurik, his “legitimate” son, were both born in 1955. The professor was married Maj Gernandt since 1943 and lived in the central and elegant district of stermalm. I only went to Bagis on Saturdays. According to Pbo, Maj knew of its existence, but the matter was not discussed in either house.
Rurik did not find out he had a brother until shortly before Bergström’s death, in 2004. He had always believed that his father worked every Saturday. As a child, Pbo did not mind the arrangement. It was what he had always known. In fact, he didn’t realize he was somewhat special until he was 10 years old, when his teacher at school asked the students to say what their parents’ professions were. Pbo replied that his was a professor. The teacher didn’t comment, but when class was over she went to talk to him.
“He took me aside and told me I had to stop lying,” recalled Pbo in a recent radio interview. The reprimand made him aware for the first time of the social differences that existed between stermalm, where his answer would not have attracted attention, and Bagarmossen, where having parents who were professors was a pipe dream. As an adult, the situation began to bother him and he even warned Bergström that if he did not reveal the truth to his “other son”, one day he would show up at stermalm’s house and knock on the door to tell everything.
Perhaps as a reaction to so much secrecy, Pbo has never been shy about talking about his private life. Both in the media and in his book Neanderthal man: in search of the lost genomes (2014). In her youth she was an activist for UFH, the Homosexual Association of Uppsala, the city in whose university she studied. She now defines herself as bisexual: “I had a lot of relationships with men, but sometimes I also had girlfriends.” In any case, in 2008, attracted by “her youthful charm”, he married the American primatologist and geneticist Linda Vigliantwith whom he has two children.
A recurring question from the press is if his father was his great source of inspiration. Pbo replies that it was actually his madre, deceased in 2007. Karin loved the history of Egypt and there she took Svante, who was then 13 years old. That trip awake fascination with mummies and began the process that led to the discoveries that have earned him the Nobel Prize.
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