As a kid, his factory work paid for his dad’s cancer care. As an oncologist, his research offers more than survival
No one knows when, exactly, Mutlay Sayan was born. His mother told him it was sometime in the summer, before the harvest. The delivery took place on their porch, with the help of the neighbors, who used a heated kitchen knife to cut the umbilical cord, in a year that may or may not have been 1987. Eventually, someone invented a birthday for him, to satisfy the needs of official documents, just as he would fill in all sorts of other gaps — a real-life David Copperfield who went from little kid in his parents’ fields to child factory worker in Istanbul to radiation oncologist in New Jersey.
He grew up at the eastern-most tip of Turkey, which pokes like a nose into Armenia and Iran — and when describing his childhood, he often starts with everything it didn’t have. There was no electricity or running water. He’d never seen a car or a television. He didn’t go to school, so he didn’t know what a weekend was, and never learned to read. The memories feel recent to him, warm and vivid, but they’re tinged with a time-warped strangeness. “It feels like centuries ago,” he said.
