Douglas Goldstein: Tomas Lindahl is one of the three professors who have won the Nobel
Prize in Chemistry.
The actual topic that you won the prize for is what they called mechanistic studies of
DNA repair.
One of the things I’ve heard that you have said is that cancer is being treated with
drugs that could actually cause genome instability.
It sounded very frightening when you said it.
Am I misunderstanding it or is there something scary going on here?
Tomas Lindahl: You have to treat the cancers and the well-known example is radiotherapy.
That means you expose patients to ionizing radiation and you don’t expose healthy people
to ionizing radiation but in this case, it has since many years be known that ionizing
radiation kills cancer cells very effectively while the patient’s cells [survival] is
not okay.
Douglas Goldstein: The risks of radiation frankly sound worrisome if you damage the
patient more than you damage the cancer.
Is this a fundamental problem with that approach to dealing with cancer?
Tomas Lindahl: It’s not a fundamental problem.
We have known about radiotherapy for a long time.
If you do nothing, the patient will die because the tumor will grow.
You can kill the cancer cells with radiation and you do that in some minority of cases
that is a risk for the patient.
Douglas Goldstein: You’ve also spoken about the instability in cancer cells and in fact
you’ve suggested that we could exploit that instability in order to deal with them to
hopefully cure cancer.
Is this something on the horizon?
Tomas Lindahl: I think so, yes.
Douglas Goldstein: So a young man like myself should I be not too worried about getting
cancer in my older years?
Tomas Lindahl: Cancer is an old-aged disease and we are not going to live forever so you
would die from something and that could be cancer or number a lot of things.
Douglas Goldstein: Explain to us the implication of your research and how it might be applied
in the world of medicine.
Tomas Lindahl: The implication of the research is that you have to understand that our genetic
information is not as stable as people have thought before.
DNA is not made up to stay in this scale or model.
It’s a more labile structure and that makes it vulnerable.
That’s act of life and there’s nothing we can do without.
Douglas Goldstein: What are some of the steps that we should take for example your work
has to do with the DNA repair, is this very futuristic when someone discovers that he
has a problem with his DNA could actually be fixed?
Tomas Lindahl: As always in biology, first we have to understand the problem and there
is a large popular contribution.
We have to understand what goes on in the cells.
In the same way that if physicist needs to understand how atoms and molecules are put
together.
It’s not something you can do to make money in order to cure somebody but we need that
knowledge to understand what the world believes in.
Douglas Goldstein: There were billions of dollars that was invested in mapping out the
human genome.
How has that influenced your work?
Should that kind of money be spent by government?
Is that an effective way to forward research to help medicine?
Tomas Lindahl: Yes I think this is a very well-spent money to understand our genome
better.
You know to stock in knowledge and once we have the knowledge, we can [device] new cures
for diseases with something.
Douglas Goldstein: This is a sort of shotgun approach, in other words spending so much
money to do this research as opposed to for example setting up certain incentive prizes
or focusing on very specific work.
If we’re looking to develop a cure for cancer which I understand is really where your research
could be directed.
Is there a more effective way for people to be investing in this?
Tomas Lindahl: I don’t think so.
We have to build up on knowledge-based first of which goes back to old science, generation
back where children suffered from polio and there wasn’t very much we could do about
except for doing research which established that there is a polio virus and that you can
have a vaccine against it and you have actually to a large extent cure the risk for the disease.
If you don’t do the research, you will have nothing to start with.
Douglas Goldstein: Any hope that we will have a vaccine for cancer in the foreseeable future?
Tomas Lindahl: Cancer is not just one disease.
There are probably hundred different diseases.
It means some of our cells stops growing in an unregulated fashion and that can happen
due to variety of mutations.
So I don’t think we will be able within the foreseeable future to have found the drug
that will cure cancer.
We have to tackle different forms of cancer in an individual.
Douglas Goldstein: It seems that a lot of the funding that goes towards research like
yours is determined very politically depending on what one government feels that it should
be focusing on not necessarily for the number of people that will be helped but because
of something that just might be going on in terms of politics or the electric.
Did you feel in effect of that or do you feel that money is being properly distributed where
it’s most needed in the world of science?
Tomas Lindahl: I mean the money is well spent because it’s being building up our knowledge-based.
In addition to that is also a lot of our practical aspect which is I guess what you are asking
for short term solutions to specific problems.
Douglas Goldstein: Are there any specific places or companies that you feel are really
excelling in the area now that we should be looking at?
Tomas Lindahl: I don’t want to comment on individual companies.
Douglas Goldstein: Could you share with us a little bit of what your main focuses today?
Tomas Lindahl: We are continuing defining different forms of DNA instability to make
a knowledge-based more comprehensive.
Douglas Goldstein: What is the best way for listeners of the show to follow your work
and to keep up with what you’re doing?
Tomas Lindahl: There are excellent scientific journals on the web and so on, popular science
and/or original papers if you have knowledge to read them and just by reading and trying
to understand is a good thing.