Aziz Sancar was born on 8 September 1946 to a lower-middle-class family in theSavur district ofMardin Province, southeastern Turkey. His oldest brother Kenan Sancar is a retiredbrigadier general in theTurkish Armed Forces.[10] He is the second cousin of the politicianMithat Sancar, who is a member of parliament from and chairman ofHDP.[11] He is the seventh of eight children.[12]
His parents were uneducated; however, they put great emphasis on his education.[12] He was educated by idealistic teachers who received their education in theVillage 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 ofIstanbul University.[13]
According to his own account, he spokeArabic with his parents andTurkish with his siblings.[13][14] 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.[15] Aziz Sancar's brother Tahir claimed in an interview that their family descended from Oghuz Turks from Central Asia, also mentioning that they areidealists.[16] During his years at Istanbul University, he was involved with theTurkish nationalist organizationIdealist Hearths (Ülkü Ocakları).[17][18]
Sancar received his primary education near his hometown ofSavur.[19] He then completed hisMD degree inIstanbul University of Turkey in 1969 and he graduated from school as the top student. He completed hisPhD degree on the photoreactivating enzyme ofE. coli in 1977 atThe University of Texas at Dallas[20] in the laboratory of Claud Stan Rupert,[21] now Professor Emeritus.
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 fromTÜBİTAK to pursue further education in biochemistry atJohns 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.[13]
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 theUniversity of Texas at Dallas. He was accepted and completed his PhD in molecular biology there.[13] 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 forphotolyase, an enzyme that repairsthymine dimers that result from ultraviolet damage.[24]
After completing his PhD, Sancar had three rejected applications for postdoctoral positions and then took up work atYale University as a laboratory technician.[24] He worked at Yale for five years. Here, he started his field-changing work onnucleotide excision repair, another DNA mechanism that works in the dark. In the laboratory of Dean Rupp, he elucidated the molecular details of this process, identifyingUvrABC endonuclease and the genes that code for it, and furthermore discovering that these enzymes cut twice on the damaged strand of DNA, removing 12–13nucleotides that include the damaged part.[24]
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.[13] 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.[24]
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.[25]
Aziz Sancar was elected to theNational Academy of Sciences in 2005 as the first Turkish member.[25] He is the Sarah Graham Kenan Professor ofBiochemistry, at theUniversity 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 andBiophysics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.[26] 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.[3]
Sancar and his research team have discovered that two genes,Period andCryptochrome, keep the circadian clocks of all human cells in proper rhythm, syncing them to the 24 hours of the day and seasons.[27] Their findings were published in theGenes 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 asjet-lag andseasonal affective disorder, and may be useful in controlling and optimizing various cancer treatments.[28]
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.[29][30]
Sancar is a practicing Muslim.[31][32][33] 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."[34][35][36] In the immediate aftermath of being awarded the Nobel Prize, his ethnicity was questioned in social media.[37] 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 theBBC, 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."[38] Aziz Sancar's brother Tahir informed in an interview that their family descended fromOghuz Turks who once migrated fromCentral Asia. He also said that his brother's Nobel Prize was an honor for all of Turkey, including the Kurds.[39]
In an interview, Sancar stated that in his youth, he wasan idealist but he didn't participate in activities.[19][40] In another interview, Sancar stated that he supports moderatePan-Turkism.[41][42] On September 26, 2021, Sancar was the honorary guest of theTurkic 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 AffairsMevlüt Çavuşoğlu.[43][44]
Aziz Sancar donated his original Nobel Prize golden medal and certificate to themausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, with a presidential ceremony on 19 May 2016, which is the 97th anniversary ofAtatürk initiating theTurkish War of Independence.[48][49] He delivered a replica of his Nobel medal and certificate to Istanbul University, from which he earned his MD.[50]
On January 19, 2025, during a ceremony held at the Sancar Cultural Center in the state ofNorth Carolina, USA,TÜRKSOY General Secretary Sultan Raev presented Sancar with the Order of Cultural Ambassador of the Turkic World.[51]
^abcde"Nobeli alan Prof. Aziz Sancar konuştu" [Nobel Prize winner Prof. Aziz Sancar speaks out] (in Turkish).CNN Türk. 11 October 2015. Retrieved12 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."
