Your DNA is under attack. Throughout the day, radiation, carcinogenic substances, and other malevolent forces wreak havoc on the genetic code inside your cells. Yet our DNA is amazingly resilent, thanks to molecular systems that monitor and repair DNA when it gets busted up, and today three scientists took home the 2015 Chemistry Nobel Prize for discovering those mechanisms.
Tomas Lindahl of the Francis Crick Institute and Clare Hall Laboratory in the U.K., Paul Modrich of Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Duke University School of Medicine, and Aziz Sancar at the University of North Carolina shared the award. Lindahl discovered that DNA decays so fast that life on Earth ought to be impossible, leading to the discovery of systems that repair it. Modrich figured out how cells fix the errors that crop up during the ongoing replication of DNA. And Sancar "mapped nucleotide excision repair, the mechanism that cells use to repair UV damage to DNA," the Nobel Prize announcement says. "People born with defects in this repair system will develop skin cancer if they are exposed to sunlight."
Source: Nobel Prize