Aziz Sancar (b. 8 September 1946, Savur, Mardin) is a Turkish-American physician, academic, biochemist, and molecular biologist. In 2015, together with Tomas Lindahl and Paul L. Modrich, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on DNA repair.
Born on 8 September 1946 in the Savur district of Mardin, Aziz Sancar has worked at the University of North Carolina in the United States since 1997. For the past 20 years he has been known for his pioneering role in the biochemical approaches used to identify many components of DNA repair. He is also, together with Mehmet Özdoğan, the first American Turk to be elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences. Sancar won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research mapping how cells repair damaged DNA and preserve their genetic information.
The "maxicell technique," which Aziz Sancar developed and named, and the term "excinuclease/excision nuclease enzyme," which he both discovered and named, have entered the Oxford Dictionary of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Oxford in England.
He was born on 8 September 1946 in the Savur district of Mardin, the seventh of eight children of a middle-income farming family. Sancar completed his primary and secondary education in Mardin. In his high school years he took an interest in football. However, in his final year he gave up on becoming a footballer and went to Istanbul to continue his higher education.
Having entered in 1963, he graduated top of his class in 1969 from the Istanbul Faculty of Medicine at Istanbul University. After practicing medicine for two years at a health center in Savur, he traveled with a NATO–TÜBİTAK scholarship first to Johns Hopkins University, where he continued his research for a year and a half, before returning to Turkey following difficulties in adjusting. As he wished to complete his education in the United States, he went to the University of Texas at Dallas. While in Dallas, he joined the university's molecular biology program and the laboratory of Claud Stanley Rupert. In this laboratory Sancar, together with his advisor Claud Stanley Rupert, cloned a gene called "photolyase" and, through genetic engineering, reproduced it in bacteria at very high rates. The enzyme encoded by this gene repaired DNA damaged by ultraviolet light. This discovery enabled Aziz Sancar to obtain first a master's and then a doctoral degree (1977).