Andrej Plenković welcomes Paul Modrich, PhD, a Nobel Laureate of Croatian ancestry

Dragan Primorac, PhD, was part of the delegation.

Republic of Croatia, Mr. Andrej Plenković welcomed today in Banski dvori Paul Modrich, PhD, a Nobel Laureate for Chemistry in 2015.
In the delegation were: Dragan Primorac, PhD, President of the International Relations Committee of the American Academy for Forensic Sciences and President of the International Society of Applied Biological Sciences (ISABS), Minister of Health Milan Kujundzic, PhD and Special Advisor to Social Issues, Academician Zvonko Kusić.

Paul Modrich, PhD, was awarded with the Nobel Prize in 2015 for one of the most important discoveries in the history of medical science: the investigation of chemical repair mechanisms for DNA damage in E. Coli, and later clarified how this process is running in humans. For the first time, he has found that cancer cells lacking this DNA repair mechanism show resistance to oncological drugs, and that in the inherited deficiency of this mechanism, lies the reason why some people are more susceptible to developing cancer (especially colon) than others.

He currently works at the Duke University in North Carolina and continues to investigate DNA repair mechanisms as response to the environmental carcinogens. In his resume (during the Nobel Prize award ceremony) he pointed out, "My knowledge of my ancestry is limited. My paternal grandparents emigrated from Croatia in the late 1800s and settled in the coalfields of southern Colorado." Father (Laurence Mordrich) was born in Colorado in 1912. This is his first arrival in Croatia, the homeland of his ancestors.

Paul Modrich, PhD has come to Croatia on invitation of Dragan Primorac to participate in the "11th ISABS Conference on Forensic and Anthropological Genetics and Mayo Clinic Lectures in Individualized Medicine" (www.isabs.hr) one of the most significant scientific events in the world during 2019.

More than 600 scientists from 45 countries will participate in the conference that will strategically position Croatia in the world. The main topics of the conference are: personalized and regenerative medicine, pharmacogenomics, molecular diagnostics, stem cell therapy, gene and cell therapy, epigenetics, microbiome, cancer genetics, immunotherapy, forensic genetics in the fight against organized crime, anthropological genetics, DNA analysis etc. Four Nobel Prize winners will attend this year's conference: Paul Modrich, PhD (Duke University), Avram Hershko, PhD (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology), Robert Huber, PhD (Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry) and Ada Yonath, PhD (The Weizmann Institute of Science).

Text and photo: www.isabs.hr