The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2015 to Sweden’s Tomas Lindahl, United State’s Paul Modrich and Turkey’s Aziz Sancar. Natural repairing of DNA is necessary for human survival, and damaging DNA is simply unavoidable. The discoveries of these three scientists are extremely valuable to society because they are essential to the comprehension of genetic disorders. DNA is impaired everyday though exposure to UV light, radiation or even smoking. The inability of cells to fix DNA can create various genetic diseases, but now these ailments can be treated because of new repair methods.

“I never really though about cancer ever being prevented, but it’s amazing that someone has finally figured out how to do it”, said sophomore Olivia Isufi.

Tomas Lindahl, a scientist who works at the Francis Crick Institute and the Clare Hall Laboratory in the United Kingdom, has been working on these studies since 1974, he year that he identified the first known repair protein. Since 1970, Paul Modrich, a professor studying biochemistry at the Duke University School of Medicine, has been tackling a system that locates and mends mismatched base pairs. Aziz Sancar is now a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of North Carolina and has been working in this particular field of science ever since he was a student.

These researchers have been working independently over the past 40 years and have decided to split their reward of $1 million between the three of them. Thier decades of long and persistent work have finally paid off and millions of individuals can benefit from these phenomenal revelations.

“It amazes me that huge discoveries are always being made in the world of medicine,” said chemistry teacher Gina Horne. “These three scientists are going to change the lives of millions of people because they followed where science led them and didn’t give up on problems they wanted to solve.”