lasker laureates have won nobel prizes in the last seven years. evelyn witkin is joining us, ground breaking search on dna that helped shape modern genetics. also stephen elledge of harvard university, he built on witkin's work uncovering dna repair, a mechanism that protects the human genome. pleased to have both at the table. welcome. >> thank you. >> rose: great to have you here. >> pleasure to be here. >> rose: you will receive the awards tomorrow. >> yes. >> rose: tell me about you and how your career, why this direction? >> i was a graduate student at columbia. in 1943, i read a paper that came out by two scientists and they established in that paper that bacteria have genes like other organisms, and that hadn't been known before. >> rose: in '43, they did not know? >> they did not know bacteria had genes. and i got very excited when i read that paper because it seemed to me that bacteria would be a wonderful material for genetics. >> rose: to study genes. to study genes, because they divide every 20 minutes, and you can hold a billion of th

wgbh access.wgbh.org >> rose: we begin in evening with the lasker prize and we introduce you to lasker laureateswho are scientists and who, through their research, change our lives. we talk with evelyn witkin, stephen elledge and james allison. where will we be in ten years? >> i think we'll be in a situation where, if there's a precision drug that can genetically type a patient's tumors and say this drug's got a good chance of killing a lot of tumor cells, although we know it's not curative, we'll be combining that with these immunotherapies that can make that curative. the wonderful thing about the immune system is once you get t cells, they're with you the rest of your life and if the tumor comes back, they can attack it again and we can give memory to those drugs that normally are just around for hours. >> rose: w