Comments on 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
DNA repair gets studied alot. It is massive research area that has been going for the last thirty or so years. It is also a very complicated area of research. When I was teaching between 1984 and 1994 DNA research was important very important. It may have been as much as thirty percent of the biochemistry course.
The first major DNA discoveries date back to the 1950's when I was in graduate school. James Watson and Francis Crick were among the founders of meaningful DNA research because they first proposed a theory about how DNA replicates. Together with Maurice Wilkins, they won the 1962 Nobel Prize for physiology and/or medicine. I have the most regard, however for Rosalind Franklin, who had already died when the Nobel Prize was awarded and could not recieve as it is never given to people who are not alive at the time it is awarded. She was the person that probably made the whole field of DNA research possible. She was a crystallographer (crystallography is the study of atomic and molecular structures) who contributued the most to interpreting the structure of DNA by identifying what this structure looked like. Linus Pauling also probably could have taken some credit for the initial discoveries of DNA chemistry if he had been a faster worker, but he was pretty particular about his research and publications and refused to speculate as much as other people or rush papers to publication.
DNA repair has been a major field of research for about thirty years. The research that these Nobel Prize Winners were doing was part of a larger area of DNA research, but their research extended some areas just that little bit further. Their work is a significant contribution to the field, but not an astounding step. Their research is concerned with the how a DNA molecule can be repaired when it has been modified. There can be up to 10,000 repairs to a DNA molecule in one day. Each of the three researchers identified a different way in which DNA repairs itself and, as the Nobel Prize announcement states, each contibuted to battling cancer related to the damage and repair process that they studied. There are dozens of ways that DNA can be repaired. These scientists identified new ways that DNA molecules can be repaired. This may be the first time the Nobel Prize has been awarded for DNA repair, although at least twice before it has been awarded for DNA research.
Image Source: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/
