Aziz Sancar

Aziz Sancar is a Turkish-American biochemist, born on 8 September 1946 in the Savur district of Mardin Province in south-eastern Turkey. Trained as a physician, he devoted his career to how cells repair damaged DNA, elucidating the mechanisms of nucleotide excision repair in bacteria and then in humans. In 2015 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Tomas Lindahl and Paul L. Modrich "for mechanistic studies of DNA repair", becoming the second Turk to win a Nobel Prize after Orhan Pamuk. ^{1 2}

He was born in Savur to a lower-middle-class family, the seventh of eight children. His parents had no education but placed the utmost importance on it. As he told a television interviewer, he spoke Arabic with his parents and Turkish with his siblings; his elder brother Kenan is a retired brigadier general, and his second cousin Mithat Sancar is a Turkish politician of the HDP. He was taught by Village Institutes-trained teachers and excelled in all subjects; he played goalkeeper for Savur's team and was invited to trials for the Turkish under-18 national team but chose to study instead. He wanted chemistry but five classmates persuaded him into medicine, and he graduated from Istanbul University's medical school in 1969 with the highest distinction. ²

After graduating he worked as a general practitioner in Savur for about a year and a half according to the English article (his Nobel autobiographical account and other profiles say about two years). He then won a TÜBİTAK scholarship to Johns Hopkins University, arriving able to speak only French and learning English there, and worked in Claud Stan Rupert's laboratory on photoreactivation. Social difficulties made him leave after a year and a half and return to Savur as a doctor in 1973; he then wrote to Rupert, who had moved to the University of Texas at Dallas, and took his PhD there in 1977 with a thesis on the photoreactivating enzyme (DNA photolyase) of E. coli, having cloned the photolyase gene in 1976. ²

His three postdoctoral applications were rejected, and he spent five years as a laboratory technician at Yale in W. Dean Rupp's laboratory, where he worked out bacterial nucleotide excision repair: enzymes that cut the damaged strand on both sides of a lesion, removing a piece of 12–13 nucleotides. Of fifty applications for a faculty post, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill gave the only positive reply; he became the Sarah Graham Kenan Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics there and a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. At Chapel Hill he continued into human excision repair; his photolyase work culminated in a PNAS paper capturing the enzyme's radicals, and in 2014 he and his team showed that the Period and Cryptochrome genes keep the internal clocks of human cells in rhythm. In 2005 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences as its first Turkish member; he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2004) and an honorary member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences. ²

He received the 2015 prize "for mechanistic studies of DNA repair", shared with Tomas Lindahl and Paul L. Modrich; his share was for the mechanisms of nucleotide excision repair, and the Nobel facts page highlights his 1983 demonstration that bacterial repair proteins cut out UV-damaged DNA. On 19 May 2016 he presented his original Nobel medal and certificate to Anıtkabir, Atatürk's mausoleum, at a presidential ceremony, and gave a replica to Istanbul University. ^{1 2}

This section should be read as a report of different positions carried by the sources, not as the museum's verdict on them.

The ethnicity debate: After the prize, his origins were questioned on social media. His cousin Mithat Sancar says the family is Arab and Arabic is his native language; Sancar himself told the BBC: "I told them that I neither speak Arabic nor Kurdish and that I was a Turk… I'm a Turk, that's it" — although he has also said he spoke Arabic with his parents. ²

Youth politics: The English article reports that during his Istanbul University years he was involved with the Grey Wolves, an ultranationalist organisation; Sancar himself has said he was an "idealist" (ülkücü) in his youth but did not participate in its activities, and that he supports a moderate form of Pan-Turkism. In 2021 he was an honorary guest of the Turkic Council, where he spoke on "Knowledge and the National Awakening of the Turkic World". ²

Faith and science: The English article describes him as a practising Muslim, quoting his 2015 statement: "I am proud to be Muslim, but I can not state this fact in many regions of the United States due to ongoing issues." He has also said, in a 2018 interview, that evolution is a fact and not a matter of belief. ²

In 1978 he married Gwen Boles Sancar, whom he met while both were PhD students in Dallas; she is also a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at UNC. They co-founded the Aziz & Gwen Sancar Foundation and in 2008 bought the Carolina Turkish House in Chapel Hill as a cultural centre and housing for Turkish students. He holds the citizenships of Turkey, the United States and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, being naturalised by the last in 2025. His awards include the Presidential Young Investigator Award (1984), the TÜBİTAK Science Award (1995 in the English article and TÜBİTAK's own list; Turkish sources give 1997), the Vehbi Koç Award (2007) and TÜRKSOY's Order of Cultural Ambassador of the Turkic World (2025). ^{2 3}

• The defined sources cited above, registered in data/source/.
• No Wikidata identifier or Wikidata source entity is recorded for this record: wikidata.org returned HTTP 403 when opened during this check (24 October 2026), so the number was not guessed; it will be added once verified directly.
• The sources differ on the year of his TÜBİTAK Science Award — 1995 in the English article's infobox and TÜBİTAK's list, 1997 in Turkish Wikipedia and a University of Kyrenia page; this article uses 1995 and records the difference. They also differ on the length of his medical practice in Savur — 1.5 years in the English article, about two years in his Nobel autobiographical account and other profiles; this article records both.
• Later translations and edits of this article need periodic review with clear update dates.