Lindahl, Tomas

Lindahl, Tomas,

1938–, Swedish-born British biochemist, grad. Karolinska Institute (Ph.D. 1967, M.D. 1970). Lindahl was a professor at the Univ. of Gothenburg from 1978 to 1982. In 1981 he joined the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (Cancer Research UK from 2002), and became the first director (1986–2005) of its Clare Hall Laboratories, Hertfordshire, England. He retired in 2009 but remains affiliated with the Francis Crick Institute, of which Cancer Research UK is now part. Lindahl was the joint recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with Paul ModrichModrich, Paul Lawrence,
1946–, American biochemist and molecular geneticist, b. Raton, N.M., Ph.D. Stanford Univ., 1973. Modrich joined the faculty at the Duke Univ. School of Medicine in 1976, and he has been a Howard Hughes Investigator since 1994.
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 and Aziz SancarSancar, Aziz,
1946–, Turkish-American biochemist and molecular biologist, M.D. Istanbul Univ., 1969, Ph.D. Univ. of Texas at Dallas, 1977. From 1977to 1982, Sancar was a researcher at the Yale School of Medicine. In 1982, he joined the faculty at the Univ.
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, for their mechanistic studies of DNA repair. The three clarified the biochemical mechanisms involved in three types of DNA repair, which laid the foundation for targeted cancer therapies that leave healthy cells unharmed. Lindahl's work elucidated base excision repair, identifying enzymes involved and deducing the steps by which damage to the DNA bases (see nucleic acidnucleic acid,
any of a group of organic substances found in the chromosomes of living cells and viruses that play a central role in the storage and replication of hereditary information and in the expression of this information through protein synthesis.
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) is corrected.