It pays off to learn about “DNA stuff” Paul Modrich grew up in a small town in northern New Mexico, USA. The diversity of the expansive landscape spurred his interest in nature, but one day his father, a biology teacher, said: “You should learn about this DNA stuff.” This was in 1963, the year after James Watson and Francis Crick had been awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA. A few years later, that “DNA stuff” really became central to Paul Modrich’s life. Early in his research career, as doctoral student at Stanford, during his postdoc at Harvard, and as an assistant professor at Duke University, he examined a series of enzymes that affect DNA: DNA ligase, DNA polymerase and the
restriction enzyme Eco RI. When he subsequently, towards the end of the 1970s, shifted his attention to the enzyme Dam methylase he stumbled over another piece of “DNA stuff” that would come to occupy him for a large part of his scientific career.