A Nobel prize comes home

It’s a name that means the ultimate, the pinnacle of achievement in any field. And in a scientist’s career, the Nobel Prize is a multimillion-to-one shot.

This year, a scientist from Duke and one from UNC-Chapel Hill are sharing the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with a Swedish scientist. Their work independently focused on DNA repair, something they have studied and advanced for decades, and a field that one day could lead toward cell repair for cancer treatment.

And that’s about as technical as any layperson should get. Paul Modrich, 69, of Duke, Aziz Sancar, 69, of UNC-Chapel Hill and Tomas Lindahl, 77, of Sweden work in a world understood by a relative few. But they understand it, and their tireless research will one day better the lives of humankind.

Sounds like a worthy argument for a Nobel Prize.

Sancar, a U.S.-Turkish national, shared some of his excitement with his country. “Yes,” he said, “they’ve (Turkish friends) been asking over the years and I was tired of hearing, ‘When are you going to get the Nobel Prize?’ so I’m glad for my country as well.”

For his part, Modrich, vacationing in New Hampshire, didn’t care to grab the spotlight. His assistant at Duke said that all the lab workers were thrilled and that, “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said of the prize, “Their work has provided fundamental knowledge of how a living cell functions and is, for instance, used for the development of new cancer treatments.”

Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel made the prizes possible in the late 19th century. They’re awarded in the sciences, literature and for peace. Recipients go to Sweden to accept and are required to make presentations in their fields.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is one of the most difficult to win, and like the other prizes (as envisioned by Nobel himself) is awarded not just for technical achievement but for significant contributions to the betterment of the human race. They’ve been given, for example, for specific medical treatments and for things such as the development of X-rays.

In short, this achievement is nothing short of spectacular and a monument to individual determination (this one recognizes, when the research of all three is put together, decades of time in laboratories) and is shared in a way with the institutions that helped to facilitate the research.

So two Triangle universities separated by a mere 8 miles in this case raise their hands together. For humankind and with the hope that one day, the achievements in this Nobel Prize will lead to miracles.

This story was originally published October 8, 2015 at 6:40 PM with the headline "A Nobel prize comes home."