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Aziz Sancar
Sancar in 2015
Born	(1946-09-08) 8 September 1946 (age 78) Savur, Mardin, Turkey
Citizenship	Turkey, United States
Alma mater	Istanbul University (MD, 1969) University of Texas at Dallas (PhD, 1977)
Spouses	Gwen Sancar ​(m. 1978)​
Awards	TÜBİTAK Science Award (1995) Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2005) Vehbi Koç Award (2007) Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2015)
Scientific career
Fields	Biochemistry Molecular biology DNA repair Molecular biophysics Cancer research
Institutions	UNC School of Medicine UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center Yale School of Medicine
Thesis	A study on photoreactivating enzyme (DNA photolyase) of Escherichia coli (1977)
Doctoral advisor	Claud Stan Rupert

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

Early life

Aziz Sancar was born on 8 September 1946 to a lower-middle-class 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.

Origins

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. During his years at Istanbul University, he was involved with the Turkish nationalist organization Idealist Hearths (Ülkü Ocakları).

Education

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 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.

Career

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. 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.

Aziz Sancar was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005 as the first Turkish member. He is the Sarah Graham Kenan Professor of Biochemistry, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is married to Gwen Boles Sancar, who graduated the same year and who is also a professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Together, they founded Carolina Türk Evi, a permanent Turkish Center in close proximity to the campus of UNC-CH, which provides graduate housing for four Turkish researchers at UNC-CH, short term guest services for Turkish visiting scholars, and a center for promoting Turkish-American interchange.

Research on circadian clock

Sancar and his research team have discovered that two genes, Period and Cryptochrome, keep the circadian clocks of all human cells in proper rhythm, syncing them to the 24 hours of the day and seasons. Their findings were published in the Genes and Development journal on September 16, 2014. Sancar's research has provided a complete understanding of the workings of Circadian clocks in humans, which may be used to treat a wide range of different illnesses and disorders such as jet-lag and seasonal affective disorder, and may be useful in controlling and optimizing various cancer treatments.

Personal life

Sancar is married to Gwen Boles Sancar, with whom he met during his PhD in Dallas, where she was also studying molecular biology. They got married in 1978.

Sancar is a practising Muslim. In an interview, he stated: "I am proud to be Muslim, but I can not state this fact in many regions of the United States due to ongoing issues." In the immediate aftermath of being awarded the Nobel Prize, his ethnicity was questioned in social media. Sancar said he was "disturbed by some of the questions he received," particularly by questions about his ethnic background. When asked as to whether he is "a Turk or half-Arab" by the BBC, Aziz Sancar responded: "I told them that I neither speak Arabic nor Kurdish and that I was a Turk," he said. "I'm a Turk, that's it." Aziz Sancar's brother Tahir informed in an interview that their family descended from Oghuz Turks who once migrated from Central Asia. He also said that his brother's Nobel Prize was an honor for all of Turkey, including the Kurds.

In an interview, Sancar stated that in his youth, he was an idealist but he didn't participate in activities. In another interview, Sancar stated that he supports moderate Pan-Turkism. On September 26, 2021, Sancar was the honorary guest of the Turkic Council on occasion of the meeting of the foreign secretaries from member states and has given a presentation titled "Knowledge and the National Awakening of the Turkic World", as announced by Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu.

Awards

He was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Tomas Lindahl and Paul L. Modrich for their mechanistic studies of DNA repair. He was granted Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation in Molecular Biophysics in 1984. Sancar is the second Turkish Nobel laureate after Orhan Pamuk, who is also an alumnus of Istanbul University.

Aziz Sancar donated his original Nobel Prize golden medal and certificate to the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, with a presidential ceremony on 19 May 2016, which is the 97th anniversary of Atatürk initiating the Turkish War of Independence. He delivered a replica of his Nobel medal and certificate to Istanbul University, from which he earned his MD.

References

1. "Geçmiş Yıllarda Bilim Ödülü Alanlar" (in Turkish). Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. Retrieved 9 October 2015.
2. "Ödül Alanlar". Vehbi Koç Award. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 9 October 2015.
3. ^ "The Aziz & Gwen Sancar Foundation – Carolina Türk Evi – Turkish House, NC". carolinaturkevi.org. Archived from the original on 2015-10-09. Retrieved 7 October 2015.
4. "A Nobel Partnership". magazine.utdallas.edu. Retrieved 2021-09-12.
5. "Aziz Sancar | Biography, Facts, & Nobel Prize". 4 September 2024.
6. "Aziz Sancar". UNC School of Medicine. Archived from the original on May 4, 2015. Retrieved December 5, 2015.
7. ^ Broad, William J. (7 October 2015). "Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar for DNA Studies". The New York Times. Retrieved 7 October 2015.
8. ^ Staff (7 October 2015). "THE NOBEL PRIZE IN CHEMISTRY 2015 – DNA repair – providing chemical stability for life" (PDF). Nobel Prize. Retrieved 7 October 2015.
9. "UNC-Chapel Hill Scientist Aziz Sancar Wins Nobel Prize for Chemistry" (Press release). UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. 7 October 2015. Retrieved 11 January 2016.
10. "Aziz Sancar'ı, emekli general ağabeyi anlattı". Hurriyet.com.tr. 8 October 2015. Retrieved 3 December 2017.
11. "Turkish-American scientist among winners of 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry". Today's Zaman. Archived from the original on October 11, 2015. Retrieved 12 October 2015.
12. ^ "Nobel Kimya Ödülü'nü Türk asıllı Aziz Sancar kazandı (Aziz Sancar kimdir)". Hürriyet (in Turkish). 2015-10-07. Retrieved 2015-10-07.
13. ^ "Nobeli alan Prof. Aziz Sancar konuştu" [Nobel Prize winner Prof. Aziz Sancar speaks out] (in Turkish). CNN Türk. 11 October 2015. Retrieved 12 December 2015. Anne babayla Arapça konuşurduk ama çocuklar kendi aramızda Türkçe konuşarak büyüdük. Translation: "We spoke in Arabic with our parents but as the children we grew up speaking in Turkish with one another."
14. "Nobel Prize in Chemistry: how our DNA repairs itself". Deutsche Welle. 7 October 2015.
15. "Aziz Sancar ailesi şaşırttı Arap mı Kürt mü?". İnternetHaber. 9 October 2015. Retrieved 8 July 2022.
16. "Aziz Sancar ailesi şaşırttı Arap mı Kürt mü?". İnternetHaber. 9 October 2015. Retrieved 8 July 2022.
17. "Aziz Sancar, Türkeş'in kızına Beşiktaş Ülkü Ocakları'ndaki fotoğrafını gösterdi". Serbestiyet. 2021-01-11. Retrieved 2024-08-01.
18. "Nobel'li Prof. Aziz Sancar:Lise yıllarında ülkücüydüm". T24. 2015-11-10. Retrieved 2024-10-02.
19. ^ "Nobel'li Prof. Aziz Sancar: Lise yıllarında ülkücüydüm; sinema ve tiyatroya hiç gitmedim". T24. 11 October 2015.
20. "Aziz Sancar". UNC School of Medicine. Retrieved 2015-10-07.
21. Sancar, Aziz (1977). A study on photoreactivating enzyme (DNA photolyase) of Escherichia coli (Ph.D. thesis). University of Texas at Dallas. OCLC 4432179 – via ProQuest.
22. "Prof. Dr. Aziz Sancar". Turkish Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on 23 April 2016. Retrieved 9 October 2015.
23. "American Academy Announces 2004 Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 9 October 2015.
24. ^ "DNA repair – providing chemical stability for life" (PDF). Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
25. ^ Zagorski, N. (2005). "Profile of Aziz Sancar". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 102 (45): 16125–16127. Bibcode:2005PNAS..10216125Z. doi:10.1073/pnas.0507558102. PMC 1283445. PMID 16263927.
26. "Biology : Aziz Sancar elected to the National Academy of Sciences". utdallas.edu. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 7 October 2015.
27. Ye, Rui; Selby, Cristopher P.; Chiou, Yi-Ying; Ozkan-Dagliyan, Irem; Gaddameedhi, Shobhan; Sancar, Aziz (15 September 2014). "Dual modes of CLOCK:BMAL1 inhibition mediated by Cryptochrome and Period proteins in the mammalian circadian clock". Genes & Development. 28 (18): 1989–1998. doi:10.1101/gad.249417.114. ISSN 1549-5477. PMC 4173159. PMID 25228643.
28. Derewicz, Mark (16 September 2014). "Sancar lab finds final pieces to the circadian clock puzzle". UNC SCHOOL of MEDICINE. The University of North Carolina. Retrieved 19 April 2016.
29. "For Aziz Sancar, long hours in lab lead to triumph". The News and Observer. 25 December 2015. Retrieved 9 March 2016.
30. "Aziz Sancar receives 2009 Distinguished Alumni Award from University of Texas, Dallas". UNC School of Medicine. 17 June 2009. Retrieved 16 May 2016.
31. "Aziz Sancar'dan dini tartışmalara tepki". Yeni Çağ Gazetesi (in Turkish). 2017-06-16. Retrieved 2021-12-06.
32. "Aziz Sancar: 'Evrim gerçektir, inanç meselesi değildir'". CNN Türk (in Turkish). 11 December 2018. Retrieved 2021-12-06.
33. "Aziz Sancar: Müslümanım ve Allah'a inanıyorum". Haber3 (in Turkish). 2017-06-29. Archived from the original on 2021-12-06. Retrieved 2021-12-06.
34. "Aziz Sancar: I am proud of being a Muslim but I cannot say it". The Peninsula Newspaper. 2015-12-21. Archived from the original on 2021-12-06. Retrieved 2021-12-06.
35. "Aziz Sancar: Müslüman olduğumu ABD'de söyleyemem". Ahaber (in Turkish). Retrieved 2021-12-06.
36. "Müslüman olduğumu Amerika'da söyleyemem". Ensonhaber (in Turkish). 20 December 2015. Archived from the original on 2020-11-24. Retrieved 2021-12-06.
37. Arango, Tim (12 October 2015). "Deadly Ankara Attack Not Enough to Unify a Polarized Turkey". The New York Times. Retrieved 23 November 2015.
38. Esra Kaymak; Erkan Avci (8 October 2015). "Turkish Nobel Prize winner happy most for his country". Anadolu Agency. Retrieved 23 November 2015.
39. "Nobel ödüllü Sancar'ı ailesi anlattı" (in Turkish). Anadolu Agency. 8 October 2015. Retrieved 23 November 2015 – via TRT Haber.
40. "Aziz Sancar – Ropörtaj". Hürriyet. 10 October 2015. Retrieved 13 January 2016.
41. Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: "Aziz Sançar – En Büyük Hayalim Türk Birliği". YouTube. 19 July 2018.
42. "Prof. Aziz Sancar'dan Özbekistan'a çıkarma: Hayalim Türk birliğini görmek". Kırım Haber Ajansı – QHA (in Turkish). 2019-10-18. Retrieved 2021-12-06.
43. "Nobel ödüllü bilim insanı Sancar, Türk Konseyi dışişleri bakanlarının onur konuğu oldu". TRT Avaz. 26 September 2021. Retrieved 27 September 2021.
44. Çavuşoğlu, Mevlüt. "#TürkKonseyi Dışişleri Bakanları toplantımızın akşam yemeğinde onur konuğumuz, en büyük hayali Türk Dünyası'nın birliğini görmek olan Nobel ödüllü bilim insanımız Aziz Sancar'dı. @AzizGwenSancar 'ın yaptığı "Bilgi ve Türk Dünyası'nın Milli Uyanışı" konulu sunumu ilgiyle dinledik". Twitter. Retrieved 27 September 2021.
45. Award Abstract #8351212, National Science Foundation
46. "UNC Nobel laureates Oliver Smithies and Aziz Sancar present medals to UNC". UNC Healthcate. Archived from the original on 10 June 2016. Retrieved 16 May 2016.
47. "Cumhurbaşkanı Erdoğan, Nobel Ödülü'nün Anıtkabir Komutanlığına Takdim Törenine Katıldı". Presidency of the Republic of Turkey. 19 May 2016. Retrieved 21 May 2016.
48. "Nobel laureate Sancar donates his award to Anıtkabir". Hürriyet Daily News. 19 May 2016. Retrieved 21 May 2016.

External links

• Official website of the Aziz & Gwen Sancar Foundation
• Aziz Sancar on Nobelprize.org

v t e Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
1901–1925	1901: Jacobus van 't Hoff 1902: Emil Fischer 1903: Svante Arrhenius 1904: William Ramsay 1905: Adolf von Baeyer 1906: Henri Moissan 1907: Eduard Buchner 1908: Ernest Rutherford 1909: Wilhelm Ostwald 1910: Otto Wallach 1911: Marie Curie 1912: Victor Grignard / Paul Sabatier 1913: Alfred Werner 1914: Theodore Richards 1915: Richard Willstätter 1916 1917 1918: Fritz Haber 1919 1920: Walther Nernst 1921: Frederick Soddy 1922: Francis Aston 1923: Fritz Pregl 1924 1925: Richard Zsigmondy
1926–1950	1926: Theodor Svedberg 1927: Heinrich Wieland 1928: Adolf Windaus 1929: Arthur Harden / Hans von Euler-Chelpin 1930: Hans Fischer 1931: Carl Bosch / Friedrich Bergius 1932: Irving Langmuir 1933 1934: Harold Urey 1935: Frédéric Joliot-Curie / Irène Joliot-Curie 1936: Peter Debye 1937: Norman Haworth / Paul Karrer 1938: Richard Kuhn 1939: Adolf Butenandt / Leopold Ružička 1940 1941 1942 1943: George de Hevesy 1944: Otto Hahn 1945: Artturi Virtanen 1946: James B. Sumner / John Northrop / Wendell Meredith Stanley 1947: Robert Robinson 1948: Arne Tiselius 1949: William Giauque 1950: Otto Diels / Kurt Alder
1951–1975	1951: Edwin McMillan / Glenn T. Seaborg 1952: Archer Martin / Richard Synge 1953: Hermann Staudinger 1954: Linus Pauling 1955: Vincent du Vigneaud 1956: Cyril Hinshelwood / Nikolay Semyonov 1957: Alexander Todd 1958: Frederick Sanger 1959: Jaroslav Heyrovský 1960: Willard Libby 1961: Melvin Calvin 1962: Max Perutz / John Kendrew 1963: Karl Ziegler / Giulio Natta 1964: Dorothy Hodgkin 1965: Robert Woodward 1966: Robert S. Mulliken 1967: Manfred Eigen / Ronald Norrish / George Porter 1968: Lars Onsager 1969: Derek Barton / Odd Hassel 1970: Luis Federico Leloir 1971: Gerhard Herzberg 1972: Christian B. Anfinsen / Stanford Moore / William Stein 1973: Ernst Otto Fischer / Geoffrey Wilkinson 1974: Paul Flory 1975: John Cornforth / Vladimir Prelog
1976–2000	1976: William Lipscomb 1977: Ilya Prigogine 1978: Peter D. Mitchell 1979: Herbert C. Brown / Georg Wittig 1980: Paul Berg / Walter Gilbert / Frederick Sanger 1981: Kenichi Fukui / Roald Hoffmann 1982: Aaron Klug 1983: Henry Taube 1984: Robert Merrifield 1985: Herbert A. Hauptman / Jerome Karle 1986: Dudley R. Herschbach / Yuan T. Lee / John Polanyi 1987: Donald J. Cram / Jean-Marie Lehn / Charles J. Pedersen 1988: Johann Deisenhofer / Robert Huber / Hartmut Michel 1989: Sidney Altman / Thomas Cech 1990: Elias Corey 1991: Richard R. Ernst 1992: Rudolph A. Marcus 1993: Kary Mullis / Michael Smith 1994: George Olah 1995: Paul J. Crutzen / Mario Molina / F. Sherwood Rowland 1996: Robert Curl / Harold Kroto / Richard Smalley 1997: Paul D. Boyer / John E. Walker / Jens Christian Skou 1998: Walter Kohn / John Pople 1999: Ahmed Zewail 2000: Alan J. Heeger / Alan MacDiarmid / Hideki Shirakawa
2001–present	2001: William Knowles / Ryoji Noyori / K. Barry Sharpless 2002: John B. Fenn / Koichi Tanaka / Kurt Wüthrich 2003: Peter Agre / Roderick MacKinnon 2004: Aaron Ciechanover / Avram Hershko / Irwin Rose 2005: Robert H. Grubbs / Richard R. Schrock / Yves Chauvin 2006: Roger D. Kornberg 2007: Gerhard Ertl 2008: Osamu Shimomura / Martin Chalfie / Roger Y. Tsien 2009: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan / Thomas A. Steitz / Ada E. Yonath 2010: Richard F. Heck / Akira Suzuki / Ei-ichi Negishi 2011: Dan Shechtman 2012: Robert Lefkowitz / Brian Kobilka 2013: Martin Karplus / Michael Levitt / Arieh Warshel 2014: Eric Betzig / Stefan Hell / William E. Moerner 2015: Tomas Lindahl / Paul L. Modrich / Aziz Sancar 2016: Jean-Pierre Sauvage / Fraser Stoddart / Ben Feringa 2017: Jacques Dubochet / Joachim Frank / Richard Henderson 2018: Frances Arnold / Gregory Winter / George Smith 2019: John B. Goodenough / M. Stanley Whittingham / Akira Yoshino 2020: Emmanuelle Charpentier / Jennifer Doudna 2021: David MacMillan / Benjamin List 2022: Carolyn R. Bertozzi / Morten P. Meldal / Karl Barry Sharpless 2023: Moungi G. Bawendi / Louis E. Brus / Alexei I. Ekimov 2024: David Baker / Demis Hassabis / John M. Jumper

• Biology
• Science
• Biography

• 1946 births
• Turkish people of Arab descent
• Living people
• Nobel laureates in Chemistry
• Turkish biochemists
• Turkish emigrants to the United States
• Turkish medical researchers
• Turkish Nobel laureates
• Recipients of TÜBİTAK Science Award
• Istanbul University alumni
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty
• University of Texas at Dallas alumni
• Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
• Honorary members of the Turkish Academy of Sciences
• Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• People from Savur
• Turkish expatriate academics
• American academics of Turkish descent
• American Nobel laureates
• American biochemists
• Members of the National Academy of Medicine
• American Muslims