Bergström, Sune K.

Sune K. Bergström, (born January 10, 1916, Stockholm, Sweden—died August 15, 2004, Stockholm), Swedish biochemist, corecipient with fellow Swede Bengt Ingemar Samuelsson and Englishman John Robert Vane of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. All three were honoured for their isolation, identification, and analysis of prostaglandins, which are biochemical compounds that influence blood pressure, body temperature, allergic reactions, and other physiological phenomena in mammals. Bergström was the first to demonstrate the existence of more than one such compound and to determine the elemental compositions of two of them.

Bergström was educated at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, where he was awarded doctoral degrees in medicine and biochemistry in 1944. He held research fellowships at Columbia University and at the University of Basel and then returned to Sweden to accept a professorship of chemistry at the University of Lund.

In 1958 Bergström returned to the Karolinska Institute, where he became dean of the medical faculty in 1963 and rector in 1969. After retiring from teaching in 1981, he continued to conduct research. He was chairman of the Nobel Foundation (1975–87) and chairman of medical research at the World Health Organization (1977–82).

Bergström’s son Svante Pääbo was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his research on hominin genomes and human evolution.