Aziz Sancar

Aziz Sancar (born 8September 1946) is a Turkish molecular biologist specializing in DNA repair, cell cycle checkpoints, and circadian clock.

Aziz Sancar was born on 8 September 1946 to a lower-middle-class Arab family in the Savur district of Mardin Province, southeastern Turkey.

His oldest brother Kenan Sancar is a retired brigadier general in the Turkish Armed Forces.

He is the second cousin of the politician Mithat Sancar, who is a member of parliament from and chairman of HDP.

He was the seventh of eight children.

His parents were uneducated; however, they put great emphasis on his education.

He was educated by idealistic teachers who received their education in the Village Institutes, he later stated that this was a great inspiration to him.

Throughout his school life, Sancar had great academic success that was noted by his teachers.

He wanted to study chemistry whilst at high school, but was persuaded to study medicine after five of his classmates also got into medicine along with him.

As such, he studied medicine at the Faculty of Medicine of Istanbul University.

According to his own account, he spoke Arabic with his parents and Turkish with his siblings.

However, when asked about his origins, Sancar only underlined his Turkish nationality.

Still, his cousin, Mithat Sancar, mentioned that their family is of Arab origins.

Aziz Sancar's brother Tahir claimed in an interview that their family descended from Oghuz Turks from Central Asia, also mentioning that they are idealists.

Sancar received his primary education near his hometown of Savur.

He then completed his MD degree in Istanbul University of Turkey in 1969 and he graduated from school as the top student.

He then won a scholarship from TÜBİTAK to pursue further education in biochemistry at Johns Hopkins University, but returned to Savur in 1973 as a doctor after spending 1.5 years there due to having social difficulties and inability to adapt to the American way of life.

He only spoke French when he arrived in the US, but learned English during his education at Johns Hopkins.

Soon after, he wrote to Rupert, who had been involved in the discovery of DNA repair and was at Johns Hopkins during Sancar's time there but had since moved to the University of Texas at Dallas.

He was accepted and completed his PhD in molecular biology there.

His interest had been stimulated by the recovery of bacteria, which had been exposed to deadly amounts of ultraviolet radiation, upon their illumination with blue light.

In 1976, as part of his doctoral dissertation, he managed to replicate the gene for photolyase, an enzyme that repairs thymine dimers that result from ultraviolet damage.

After completing his PhD, Sancar had three rejected applications for postdoctoral positions and then took up work at Yale University as a laboratory technician.

He worked at Yale for five years.

Here, he started his field-changing work on nucleotide excision repair, another DNA mechanism that works in the dark.

In the laboratory of Dean Rupp, he elucidated the molecular details of this process, identifying UvrABC endonuclease and the genes that code for it, and furthermore discovering that these enzymes cut twice on the damaged strand of DNA, removing 12–13 nucleotides that include the damaged part.

Following his mechanistic elucidations of nucleotide exchange repair, he was accepted as a lecturer at the University of North Carolina, the only university that he got a positive response from out of the 50 he applied to.

He has stated that his accent of English was detrimental to his career as a lecturer.

At Chapel Hill, Sancar discovered the following steps of nucleotide excision repair in bacteria and worked on the more complex version of this repair mechanism in humans.

His longest-running study has involved photolyase and the mechanisms of photo-reactivation.

In his inaugural article in the PNAS, Sancar captured the photolyase radicals he has chased for nearly 20 years, thus providing direct observation of the photocycle for thymine dimer repair.

He completed his PhD degree on the photoreactivating enzyme of E. coli in 1977 at The University of Texas at Dallas in the laboratory of Claud Stan Rupert, now Professor Emeritus.

Sancar is an honorary member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

After graduating from Istanbul University, Sancar returned to Savur.

Although he wanted to go to the United States, he was recommended to try out being a doctor, and he worked as a doctor in the region for 1.5 years.

Aziz Sancar was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005 as the first Turkish member.

In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Tomas Lindahl and Paul L. Modrich for their mechanistic studies of DNA repair.

He has made contributions on photolyase and nucleotide excision repair in bacteria that have changed his field.

Sancar is currently the Sarah Graham Kenan Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.

He is the co-founder of the Aziz & Gwen Sancar Foundation, which is a non-profit organization to promote Turkish culture and to support Turkish students in the United States.