Aziz Sancar grew up as a farm boy in a small town in Turkey. He was a bright child and attended medical school. He returned to his hometown and practiced medicine for a few years.
But even in his daily practice, Sancar had questions about how things worked on the molecular level.
He moved to the U.S. and enrolled in a Ph.D. program in Dallas to study molecular biology. Sancar began his work on DNA that would lead to a Nobel Prize for chemistry decades later.
He wanted to understand how cells could repair DNA that had been damaged by ultraviolet light. He discovered the mechanism and published the description of what is now known as nucleotide excision repair.
Host Frank Stasio talks with Dr. Aziz Sancar, professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Medicine, about his life and Nobel Prize-winning research.
Sancar will speak at the Oliver Smithies Nobel Symposium this afternoon at 3 p.m. in the MBRB Auditorium at UNC.
