TÜBA Member Aziz Sancar Awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015
Aziz Sancar, member of Turkish Academy of Sciences and Sarah Graham Kenan Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at University of North Carolina, has been awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015 along with Thomas Lindahl of Francis Crick Institute and Clare Hall Laboratory (UK) and Paul Modrich of Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Duke University School of Medicine (USA) for their “mechanistic studies of DNA repair”.
Sancar earned the award for mapping nucleotide excision repair, the mechanism that cells use to repair UV damage to DNA. People born with defects in this repair system will develop skin cancer if they are exposed to sunlight. The cell also utilizes nucleotide excision repair to correct defects caused by mutagenic substances, among other things
Nobel Laureate Aziz Sancar was born in Savur district of Mardin province, Turkey, in 1946. He completed his M.D. in Istanbul University, School of Medicine, Turkey, and did his Ph.D. at the University of Texas. Upon receiving the award, Aziz Sancar said: “I am of course honored to get this recognition for all the work I've done over the years, but I'm also proud for my family and for my native country and my adopted country, and especially for Turkey it's quite important.” The Laureate added that the high quality education he got in Turkey formed the basis for this award.
Expressing his joy at Sancar’s Nobel Prize, Professor Ahmet Cevat Acar, the President of TUBA, said: “This is a big day for TUBA and Turkish scientific community and it is not only symbolically significant but also quite encouraging for us. We wholeheartedly congratulate our Nobel Laureate and thank him for giving us such a joy.”
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