Raton Native Receives Nobel Prize in Chemistry

~ Post by Bill Donati

  The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015 was awarded to three recipients including a former Raton resident, Paul Modrich. Along with Modrich, Tomas Lindahl and Aziz Sancar were named laureates for having mapped, at a molecular level, how cells repair damaged DNA and safeguard the genetic information. Their work has provided fundamental knowledge of how a living cell functions and is, for instance, used for the development of new cancer treatments.

Paul Modrich grew up in Raton and graduated from Raton High School in 1964.  According to the Nobel website, the “diversity of the expansive landscape” spurred his interest in nature, but one day his father, a biology teacher, said: “You should learn about this DNA stuff.” This was in 1963, and a few years later, that “DNA stuff” really became central to Paul Modrich’s life. Early in his research career, as doctoral student at Stanford, during his postdoc at Harvard, and as an assistant professor at Duke University, he examined a series of enzymes that affect DNA. Towards the end of the 1970s, he shifted his attention to another enzyme and he stumbled over another piece of “DNA stuff” that would come to occupy him for a large part of his scientific career.

Modrich’s research with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC, 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 thousand-fold. Congenital defects in mismatch repair are known, for example, to cause a hereditary variant of colon cancer.

The three Nobel Laureates in Chemistry 2015 are sharing the almost $1,000,000 prize and will receive their awards on December 10 in ceremonies in Stockholm, Sweden.