The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said their work on DNA fix “has provided fundamental knowledge of how a living cell functions” and can be used for the development of new cancer treatments, the Associated Press news agency reported.
Advertisement
Each of the three recipients of the prestigious award – Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar – has researched a different way that cells fix damaged DNA to safeguard genetic information. Luckily for humankind, many molecular systems are in place inside the body that monitor and fix DNA, and keep total chaos at bay.
Lindahl earned his Ph.D. from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and is now an emeritus leader at the Francis Crick Institute and Clare Hall Laboratory in Britain.
Sancar, 69, works at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill, N.C. – and is the second Turk to win a Nobel Prize.
Aziz Sancar, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, discovered how cells fix DNA that’s damaged by UV radiation.
Chemistry was the third of this year’s Nobel prizes. “Especially for Turkey, it’s quite important”. Gül said Sancar’s success will inspire many Turkish scientists.
Modrich, on vacation in New Hampshire, said he found out about his prize when a colleague emailed congratulations.
“I’ve done significant work to deserve the prize, but I was not expecting it this year”. “It’s nice to know other people put it in that class”.
The scientists shared the 8 million Swedish kronor ($960,000) prize. He then completed his associate professorship thesis at Yale University in the field of DNA fix. Our DNA is constantly under assault from ultraviolet rays from the sun and carcinogenic substances.
DNA was thought to be a stable until the 1970s, when Lindahl showed that it gets damaged so often that it seemed human life would be impossible. He realized that there must a fix mechanism, opening a new field of research, the academy said. During cell division, DNA replication mistakes can be made, leading to mismatched nucleotides (the pairs of bases that make up the rungs of the DNA “ladder”). Researchers are now looking at ways to destroy the fix mechanisms within the cancer cells to kill them, academy member Peter Brzezinski said. And at least one new cancer drug is being developed using that technique.
Advertisement
The prize is named after dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel and has been awarded since 1901 for achievements in science, literature and peace in accordance with his will. Japanese and Canadian scientists won the physics prize for discovering that tiny particles called neutrinos have mass.
