Sancar Vs Mobdrich

While the academic careers of Aziz Sancar and Paul Modrich are certainly fascinating and astounding, to me it was actually one of the least important parts of the story. I’ve always held a stereotype of a scientist: One in which there is a gray-haired man hunched over in a lab alone, slowly driving himself insane over his research. While that life might be paradise for some scientists, I know for a fact that I would personally find it a living hell to be confined to a lab all day and every day. This concern over fulfilling the scientist stereotype has been one of my chief concerns with my choice of major: Will I end up a piece of lab equipment? Reading the stories of these two men have given me a bit of confidence that I won’t become part of the furniture in the lab.
Sancar and Dr. Modrich have provided to the field, both still find great amounts of time outside of their labs. Dr. Sancar is a massive fan of UNC women’s soccer (I much prefer our basketball games, but to each his own) and runs a boarding house for Turkish students here at UNC. Dr. Modrich is a fan of trap shooting (something I can get a bit more behind), and an amateur astronomer to boot. Both men are happily married and have children (or god children in the case of Dr. Sancar), both have a family life. They defy my personal stereotype of the brilliant scientist; my stereotype being characterized by a man like Nikolai Telsa who was purposefully celibate, who devoted his entire life to his work. Though Sancar did go through a period of extremely intensive work during his time at Yale, it seems that now he has plenty of time to pursue his own passions outside of science. The fact that both these men have so much time to explore their research and maintain a life outside of science is extremely reassuring to me when entering the