This is a scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Steve Mursky. Got a minute?

This year's prize is about the cells toolbox for repairing DNA.

Gorin Hansen, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences at about

550 a.m. Eastern Time.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

jointly to Thomas Lindol, Paul Modrich, and Assise Sanjar, for mechanistic studies of DNA repair.

Thomas Lindle is at the Francis Crick Institute and Claire Hall Laboratory in the UK.

Paul Modrich is at the Duke University School of Medicine,

and Aziz Sankar is at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Damages occur to your DNA every day.

Sarah Snogger up Lindsey is the chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

In fact, right here, right now, if all of those errors were left uncorrected, your genetic material would have very

little resemblance to the original chromosomes in your very first cell.

Life as we know it today is totally dependent on DNA repair mechanisms

as have been revealed in molecular detail by this year's chemistry lawyers.

Thomas Lindahl showed that DNA, which had been thought to be a stable molecule, would decay quickly

without a way to monitor and fix it.

He discovered what's called base excision repair,

involving enzymes that get rid of mistakes and prevent mutations.

Paul Mojert showed how cells correct errors that take place during DNA replication every time a cell divides.

This mismatch repair fixes some 99.9% of the errors that take place.

Azizankar worked out what's known as nucleotide excision repair.

...