 Pääbo was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2000.In 2005 he received the prestigious Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine.In October 2009 the Foundation For the Future announced that Pääbo had been awarded the 2009 Kistler Prize for his work isolating and sequencing ancient DNA, beginning in 1984 with a 2,400-year-old mummy.