Tomas Lindahl
Nobel prize winning Swedish biologist · Sweden · Scientists · Born 1938 · age 88
Tomas Lindahl is read about 60 times a day, in 60 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 7 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 75 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?He proved that DNA isn't the indestructible blueprint we thought - it breaks down constantly, and cells fix it thousands of times a day. That insight won him the Nobel and reshaped how we understand cancer and aging.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
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D810 5258 Paul L. Modrich & Tomas Lindahl, chemistry (23588569995)Awards
About this person
Tomas Robert Lindahl was born 28 January 1938 and built a career spanning Sweden and Britain, focusing on cancer research. His work zeroed in on something counterintuitive: DNA, the molecule of heredity, is fragile and decays continually inside living cells. He mapped the molecular machinery that patches it back together, revealing repair mechanisms running silently in every organism. In 2015, that work earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, shared with Paul L. Modrich and Aziz Sancar, for mechanistic studies of DNA repair. The prize recognized decades spent showing that life depends not on perfection, but on constant, invisible correction.
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