{"id":4086,"date":"2016-01-01T21:55:00","date_gmt":"2016-01-02T02:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/biochem\/aziz-sancar-honored-as-tar-heel-of-the-year\/"},"modified":"2018-08-01T10:27:37","modified_gmt":"2018-08-01T14:27:37","slug":"aziz-sancar-honored-as-tar-heel-of-the-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/biochem\/news\/aziz-sancar-honored-as-tar-heel-of-the-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Aziz Sancar honored as Tar Heel of the Year"},"content":{"rendered":"
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2015 Tar Heels of the Year are Aziz Sancar of the University of North Carolina and Paul Modrich of Duke University.<\/p>\n

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Photo Courtesy of Elena Boffetta
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Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar returned this month from Sweden with a Nobel Prize that officially cites their \u201cmechanistic studies of DNA repair.\u201d Unofficially, the award was a win for every kid who ever disassembled a radio or captured lightning bugs in a jar.<\/p>\n

Modrich and Sancar, researchers whose findings will aid in the prevention and treatment of cancer and other diseases, are proof that the most complex scientific discoveries spring from the simplest human query: How does that work?<\/p>\n

\u201cThis one is for essentially basic science,\u201d Modrich said during a break from preparing his presentation for the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm. He, Sancar and a third winner in the prize for chemistry, Tomas Lindahl of Sweden, each were allotted 30 minutes to summarize their more than 40 years\u2019 work. \u201cThe vast majority of discoveries that have clinical impacts come from this kind of research,\u201d Modrich said.<\/p>\n

Those who spend their careers in research labs such as Modrich\u2019s, at Duke University, and Sancar\u2019s, at UNC-Chapel Hill, say the work involves long hours, interminable repetition and long odds that a given experiment will yield the anticipated results \u2013 or any useful results. Investigators worry almost constantly about landing and renewing the highly competitive grants that fund their work and that of their graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. They feel nearly unrelenting pressure to publish papers that break new ground in their fields.<\/p>\n

What drives them day after day, decade after decade, is an irrepressible need to find the truth.<\/p>\n

Story courtesy of: Martha Quillin of the News and Observer,<\/span> mquillin@newsobserver.com<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n

Watch a video as Sancar and Modrich share in their stories of receiving the Nobel Prize:<\/span><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.newsobserver.com\/news\/local\/article51333915.html<\/a>
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S
Read more here: http:\/\/www.newsobserver.com\/news\/local\/education\/article51568560.html#storylink=cpyStoary<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

2015 Tar Heels of the Year are Aziz Sancar of the University of North Carolina and Paul Modrich of Duke University.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12066,"featured_media":4087,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"layout":"","cellInformation":"","apiCallInformation":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[10,24,3,4,17],"class_list":["post-4086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-news_faculty","tag-news_2016","tag-news_dept","tag-recent-news","tag-sancar_news","odd"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAziz Sancar honored as Tar Heel of the Year | Biochemistry and Biophysics<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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