Richard Wood (molecular biologist)

Wood's first breakthrough came in 1988, after he moved to England to work at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund with Tomas Lindahl (Lindahl, Sancar and Paul Modrich later would receive the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their contributions to DNA repair). Working in Lindahl's lab, Wood developed a way to perform NER on DNA in a test tube using crude cell-free extracts from tissues. By performing this test on extracts derived from blood cells of children with XP, Wood could begin deciphering which different proteins are involved in the NER process. Extracts from children with group A XP, for example, could be “complemented” to resume DNA repair by adding extracts from children with group C XP (who have a normal group A protein but a non-functional group C protein).

The NER DNA repair pathway is a complex mechanism that cells use to repair DNA damage caused by ultraviolet sun exposure. The pathway is essential to life, and children born with mutations in genes coding for NER proteins develop xeroderma pigmentosum or XP. XP patients cannot repair DNA mutations, particularly pyrimidine dimers, caused by UV and must be continuously protected from sunlight to prevent fatal skin scarring and cancers. By the 1980s, scientists (notably Aziz Sancar) had uncovered how NER works in bacteria but this pathway remained poorly understood in mammalian cells.

Wood received his B.S. degree in Biology from Westminster College, Salt Lake City Utah (1977), his Ph.D. degree in Biophysics at the University of California, Berkeley (1981), and was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University from 1982 to 1985. He currently is J. Ralph Meadows Professor in Carcinogenesis at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He is a jazz bassist (he was a college roommate of the Hollywood composer and orchestrator Geoff Stradling) and plays in local bands and together with his wife Enid Wood, a violinist and artist.

Richard D. Wood (born June 3, 1955 in Boulder, Colorado) is an American molecular biologist specializing in research on DNA repair and mutation. He is known for pioneering studies on nucleotide excision repair (NER), particularly for reconstituting the minimum set of proteins involved in this process, identifying proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) as part of the NER complex and identifying mammalian repair polymerases.