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PROFILE
Profile of Aziz Sancar

Nick Zagorski, Science Writer

When biochemist Aziz Sancar started his doctoral studies in molecular biology at the University of Texas at Dallas (Dallas, TX), he knew he faced an uphill battle. Trained as a physician in Turkey, which at that time did not have the resources for rigorous training in research science, Sancar came to the United States believing he would not be as skilled at the laboratory bench as other students. "To compensate for this deficiency," he says, "I worked very hard and designed technically simple experiments that would go to the heart of the problem."

When one of his early, "simple" experiments repeatedly failed, Sancar began to lose confidence in some of his abilities. One day the situation worsened to the point where his benchmate told him, "Aziz, you have no talent for experimental research. I understand you were a good medical doctor; why don't you go back to practicing medicine?" Nevertheless, Sancar persisted, and his efforts have been successful, as evidenced by his 30-year research career covering DNA repair, cell cycle checkpoints, and the circadian clock. His longest-running study has involved photolyase and the mechanisms of photore-activation. In his Inaugural Article in this issue of PNAS, Sancar captures the elusive photolyase radicals he has chased for nearly 20 years, thus providing direct observation of the photocycle for thymine dimer repair (1).

Currently Sarah Graham Kenan Professor of Biochemistry at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine (Chapel Hill, NC), Sancar has employed a strategy of hard work, perseverance, and technical simplicity in his science. His honors include the Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation (1984) and the highest awards from the American Society for Photobiology (1990) and the Turkish Scientific Research Council (1995). Sancar, the first Turkish-American member of the National Academy of Sciences, as . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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Related articles in PNAS:

Inaugural Article: Direct observation of thymine dimer repair in DNA by photolyase

Ya-Ting Kao, Chaitanya Saxena, Lijuan Wang, Aziz Sancar, and Dongping Zhong
PNAS 2005 102: 16128-16132. [Abstract] [Full Text]