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NİTE

BİY L İ E BİLİMİN D ASI

A I SANCAR
Aziz Sancar is 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 anted to go to the United
States, he as recommended to try out being a doctor and he orked as a doctor in the region for 1.5 years.
He then on a scholarship from T BİTAK to pursue further education in biochemistry at ohns Hopkins Uni-
versity, but returned to Savur in 1973 as a doctor after spending 1.5 years there due to having social dif culties
and inability to adapt to the American ay of life. He only spoke French hen he arrived in the US but learned
English during his education at ohns Hopkins.
Soon after, he rote to Rupert, ho had been involved in the discovery of DNA repair and as at ohns
Hopkins during Sancar’s time there. Later he had moved to the University of Te as at Dallas. He as accepted
and completed his PhD in molecular biology there. His interest had been stimulated by the recovery of bacte-
ria, hich had been e posed to deadly amounts of ultraviolet radiation, upon their illumination ith blue light.
In 197 , 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 ork at Yale University as a laboratory technician. He orked at Yale for ve years. Here, he started his
eld-changing ork on nucleotide e cision repair, another DNA mechanism that orks in the dark. He eluci-
dated the molecular details of this process, identifying uvrABC endonuclease and the genes that code for it,
and furthermore discovering that these enzymes cut t ice on the damaged strand of DNA, removing 12-13
nucleotides that include the damaged part.
Follo ing his mechanistic elucidations of nucleotide e change repair, he as 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 as detrimental to his career as a lecturer. At Chapel Hill, Sancar dis-
covered the follo ing steps of nucleotide e cision repair in bacteria and orked on the more comple version
of this repair mechanism in humans. www.englishexampoint.com
His longest-running study has involved photolyase and the mechanisms of photo-reactivation. In his ina-
ugural 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 as elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005 as the rst Turkish-American mem-
ber. He is the Sarah raham Kenan Professor of Biochemistry, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill. He is married to en Boles Sancar, ho graduated the same year and ho is also a Professor of Bio-
chemistry and Biophysics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Together, they founded Carolina
Türk Evi, a permanent Turkish Center in close pro imity to the campus of UNC-CH, hich 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.
Sancar and his research team have discovered that t o genes, Period and Cryptochrome, keep the cir-
cadian clocks of all human cells in proper rhythm, syncing them to the 24 hours of the day and seasons. Their
ndings ere published in the enes and Development journal in September 1 , 2014. Sancar’s research has
provided a complete understanding of the orkings of Circadian clocks in humans, hich may be used to treat
a ide 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.
He as a arded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along ith Tomas Lindahl and Paul L. Modrich for their
mechanistic studies of DNA repair. He as granted Presidential Young Investigator A ard from the National
Science Foundation in Molecular Biophysics in 19 4. Sancar is the second Turkish Nobel prize inner after
Orhan Pamuk, ho is also an alumnus of Istanbul University.
Aziz Sancar donated his original Nobel Prize golden medal and certi cate to the mausoleum of Mustafa
Kemal Atatürk, ith a presidential ceremony on 19 May 201 , hich is the 97th anniversary of Atatürk initiating
the Turkish ar of Independence. He delivered a replica of his Nobel medal and certi cate to Istanbul Univer-
sity, from hich he earned his MD.

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