Sune Bergström

Karl Sune Detlof Bergström was born on 10 January 1916 in Sweden. His research into prostaglandins and related substances, shared with Bengt I. Samuelsson and John R. Vane, led to the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. By then he'd already spent years inside the machinery of Swedish science: elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1965, its president in 1983, appointed to the Nobel Foundation Board in 1975. He collected honors along the way - the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize in 1975, the Cameron Prize in 1977, the Illis quorum in 1985 - and joined academies on two continents. In 1943 he married Maj Gernandt; they had a son, Rurik Reenstierna, born in 1955. That same year another son, Svante Pääbo, was born from an affair with Estonian chemist Karin Pääbo - a fact Rurik only learned around 2004, the year Bergström died. Svante would go on to win his own Nobel in 2022.