Aziz Sancar, 8 September 1946, Savur, Turkish academic, biochemist, molecular biologist and scientist.
He was born in 1946 in Savur district of Mardin, the seventh of eight children of middle-income farmer family. He completed his primary, secondary and high school education in Mardin. He was interested in football during his high school years, but he gave up being a football player in the last year and went to Istanbul to continue his higher education.
He graduated from Istanbul University Faculty of Medicine, which he entered in 1963, with the first place in 1969. After working as a physician in a health center in Savur for two years, he went to Johns Hopkins University and then to Dallas Texas University with a NATO-TUBITAK scholarship. He joined the university’s molecular biology program and Caude Rupert’s laboratory at Dallas. In this lab, Sancar, with his consultant Claud Rupert, colonized a gene called photolyase and reproduced it at very high rates in bacteria through genetic engineering, the enzyme encoded by this gene repairing DNA destroyed by ultraviolet lights. This invention was developed by Dr. It enabled Sancar to first obtain a master’s degree and then a doctorate (1977).
Sancar worked at Yale University School of Medicine between 1977-1982. During this period, he interrupted his photolyase enzyme studies and started nucleotide cleavage repair research. He completed his associate professor thesis in the field of DNA repair. Since 1997, he has been working as Sarah Graham Kenan Professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of North Carolina in North Carolina-Chapel Hill, USA, which is known for his studies in Biochemistry and biophysics.Continuing his studies on DNA repair, cell sequencing, cancer treatment and biological clock, Sancar has published 415 scientific articles and 33 books. Sancar received awards for its use of circadian clock in cancer treatment. Receiving the North Carolina Distinguished Chemist Award given by the American Chemical Society in 2001, Sancar was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences, one of the most prestigious memberships in the scientific world, and was the first The American became Turkish. After receiving this award, he founded the Aziz & Gwen Sancar Foundation with his wife in order to help Turkish students studying in the USA and to develop Turkish-American relations and opened a student guesthouse named “Carolina Turkish House” in the state of North Carolina in the USA. Turkey was chosen as the principal member of the Academy of Sciences in 2006.Sancar was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Americans Paul Modrich and Sweden’s Tomas Lindahl for his work on DNA repair. These three researchers have been working independently of each other for more than 30 years and largely in bacterial cells. Sancar made inventions in the field of nucleotide cut repair, while Tomas Lindahl and Paul Modrich discovered some cut repair and mismatch repair, which are other DNA repair mechanisms. The basic mechanisms they illuminate were later demonstrated in complex organisms, including humans.
For example, a direct causal relationship has been found between nucleotide cut repair defects and skin cancers. Sancar was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences at a ceremony held on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death. Presented by Carl Gustaf. Sancar “is his education revolution and Ataturk’s Republic of Turkey was taking me awards. Thus the owner of this prize is the Mausoleum of Ataturk Museum and representing the Republic of Turkey “with the Nobel Prize, saying the medals and certificates were handed over to the mausoleum. The award is displayed in the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum in the special area allocated to it in Anıtkabir.
Private lifeTurkey and the United States of America has a dual citizenship. He is married to biochemistry professor Gwen Boles Sancar.
Private lifeTurkey and the United States of America has a dual citizenship. He is married to biochemistry professor Gwen Boles Sancar.
