Nobel prize for chemistry is awarded for mapping how cells repair their DNA – as it happened

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Professor Claes Gustafsson, a member of the Nobel assembly explains in the video below how the laureates’ work can help in practice:

There are now drugs being developed where one tries to utilise the fact that many cancer cells have a defect repair system already to begin with so by inhibiting repair actually in the cancer cells you might get something that... will specifically kill the cancer cells. This is a very interesting concept that is currently being developed and I think there are a number of different pharmaceutical idnustries that are currently looking into this. And I think there are one or two drugs are already available that builds on this concept.

Sir Tim Hunt, who was a joint recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine said:

This is wonderful news! Tomas was my boss for almost 20 years, a real scientists’ scientist. Pioneer in the study of DNA decay and its repair. Richly deserved prize.

Cancer Research UK has also added its congratulations:

Here is some more reaction to the announcement.

Prof Daniela Rhodes, director of NTU institute of structural biology in Singapore, said:

Tomas was a pioneer in this area of research and is totally deserving of this year’s Chemistry Nobel Prize. His work is of immense fundamental importance for understanding how the genome is maintained to prevent cancer occurrence and other human diseases.

Prof Malcolm Alison, Professor of Stem Cell Biology, Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London, said:

The fidelity of the human genome is maintained by DNA repair enzymes that can remove and repair potentially cancer-causing mutations. Tomas Lindahl has been a pioneer in this incredibly important area since all our genomes are continually subjected to millions of DNA-damaging mutations, yet cancer is relatively rare because of these repair (surveillance) mechanisms. DNA repair enzymes are analogous to proof readers of a text, continually searching for errors in the DNA alphabet of four letters (A, T, G and C), and probably succeeding in 99% of cases.

Indian activist Kailash Satyarthi, joint winner of last year’s Nobel peace prize, has offer his congratulations to the new Chemistry laureates.

Sancar is the first Turkish-born scientist to win a Nobel prize.

In an interview, he revealed how he heard the news:

I just got a call half an hour ago. My wife took it and woke me up. I wasn’t expecting it at all. I am very surprised. I tried my best to be coherent, I was sleeping, it was a pleasant experience

I am of course honoured to get this recognition for all the work I’ve done over the years but I’m also proud for my family and for my native country and for my adopted country. Especially for Turkey, it’s quite important.

Talking about repair mechanisms, he said:

They are also important in cancer treatment because many of the anti-cancer drugs do damage DNA and whether cancer cells can repair it or not can influence how cancer is treated.

Of course, it is not about the money but Tomas Lindahl, American Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar will share 8 million Swedish kronor (about £635,000).

Some more details about the new laureates:

Lindahl, 77, is an emeritus group leader at Francis Crick Institute and Emeritus director of Cancer Research UK at Clare Hall Laboratory in Britain.

Modrich, born in 1946, is an investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute and professor at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina.

Sancar, 69, is a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

One of the new laureates, US-Turkish national Aziz Sancar, said, in 2011, that people who “really must go to a tanning booth”, should do it in the morning because later in the day the ability to repair DNA damage could be impeded.

From the New Scientist:

His team found that a mouse’s circadian rhythms impede its ability to repair DNA damage caused by UV radiation in the morning. Because mice are nocturnal, you would expect the opposite in people.

In mice, “handyman” proteins that fix DNA damaged by UV seem to be more active in the evening. Mice bred to have no circadian rhythms were as likely to develop cancer in the morning as in the evening.

Here’s a link to the Guardian’s news story on the winners.

Lindahl said he became interested in this field because he found “to my surprise” that DNA gets damaged by the water we live and that cannot be avoided.

Explaining the significance of his findings and future potential applications, he said:

It’s very important that we have DNA repair. Unfortunately, in individuals that have defective DNA repair, they die early or have serious medical problems. On the other hand if we treat the cancer cells with a cancer drug, that causes the cancer cells to die ...but we don’t like it that the cancer cells can repair.

So they want the repair to be selective, said Lindahl.

Longer term he said the work “can provide better treatment and better drugs, because we have to understand how DNA is damaged.

Here is Lindahl answering a question on how DNA repair mechanisms work:

The committee says that the three laureates work “has provided fundamental knowledge of how a living cell functions and is, for instance, used for the development of new cancer treatments”.

It says that DNA damage occurs all the time and that the reason our genetic material does not disintegrate into complete chemical chaos is that a host of molecular systems continuously monitor and repair DNA.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015 awards three pioneering scientists who have mapped how several of these repair systems function at a detailed molecular level.

In the early 1970s, scientists believed that DNA was an extremely stable molecule, but Tomas Lindahl demonstrated that DNA decays at a rate that ought to have made the development of life on Earth impossible. This insight led him to discover a molecular machinery, base excision repair, which constantly counteracts the collapse of our DNA.

Aziz Sancar has mapped nucleotide excision repair, the mechanism that cells use to repair UV damage to DNA. People born with defects in this repair system will develop skin cancer if they are exposed to sunlight. The cell also utilises nucleotide excision repair to correct defects caused by mutagenic substances, among other things.

Paul Modrich has demonstrated how the cell corrects errors that occur when DNA is replicated during cell division. This mechanism, mismatch repair, reduces the error frequency during DNA replication by about a thousandfold. Congenital defects in mismatch repair are known, for example, to cause a hereditary variant of colon cancer.

Here is how the committee describe the scientists’ contribution:

From one cell to another, from one generation to the next. The genetic information that governs how human beings are shaped has flowed through our bodies for hundreds of thousands of years. It is constantly subjected to assaults from the environment, yet it remains surprisingly intact. Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar are awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015 for having mapped and explained how the cell repairs its DNA and safeguards the genetic information.

Here we go!

So far I believe we have a 100% failure rate at predicting the winners of the 2015 Nobel prizes. I’m going for John B Goodenough today. So that’s his chances out the window. Sorry John.

But back to 2015. We expect the committee to emerge in the next few minutes to give us the name of the winner - or winners - completing the science prizes for 2015.

One of the most memorable winners in recent years has to be Dan Shechtman, who was awarded the prize in 2011 for discovering quasicrystals.

He suffered a wave of criticism from leading scientists, including Linus Pauling, who said:

Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense, there are no quasi-crystals, just quasi-scientists.

The pressure became so bad, Shechtman was driven out his research group. Here he is talking to the Guardian about his head of lab:

He came back a couple of days later and said to me, ‘Danny, you are a disgrace to my group. I cannot be with you in the same group.’ So I left the group and found another group that adopted a scientific orphan.

Extraordinary stuff.

How does the Nobel committee chose the winners? Here’s how:

While we’re waiting for the discussions on the chemistry prize to wrap up in Stockholm, here’s an interesting analysis from Hamish Johnston at Physics World. It shows that more than a quarter - or 51 of 198 - physics Nobel laureates are immigrants.

You’ll be wondering how they defined immigrants...

What do we mean by an immigrant? This is a tough question, especially in science, where people tend to move around a lot and don’t always settle in one place. For the purposes of these infographics, we have used a rather crude definition of an immigrant laureate: someone who died or currently lives in a country other than that of their birth.

The UK has come out a net winner, the post goes on to say, gaining laureates from its former colonies as well as Eastern Europe.

Some Nobel chemistry trivia:

Only four women have won the chemistry prize. Marie Curie in 1911 for the discovery of radium and polonium, Irene Joliot-Curie (Marie’s daughter) in 1935 for the synthesis of new radioactive elements, Dorothy Hodgkin in 1964 for using x-rays to work out biochemical structures, and Ada Yonath in 2009 for her work on the ribosome.

Only one person, Fred Sanger, has twice won the Nobel prize in chemistry. He won in 1958 for his work on the structure of insulin, and in 1980 for work on DNA sequencing.

Frederic Joliot (Irene’s husband - he shared the 1935 prize with her) is the youngest recipient of the chemistry prize. He was 35 years old when he bagged the honour.

The average age of chemistry winners is 58 at the time they get the call from Stockholm.

For me, the chemistry prize is Nobel’s Nobel. Chemistry was his main training and it served him and his family well. Frankly, you can’t build a global explosives industry without a sound grasp of reactions. Nobel invented dynamite in 1867, and in 1875 developed gelignite.

Here’s a man - for the want of something better to do - detonating gelignite in a forest: