Prof. Dr. M. Gazi Yaşargil was born on July 6, 1925 in Lice, Diyarbakır, where his father served as a district governor. The same year, the family moved to Ankara and the five siblings went to school in Ankara. Gazi graduated from the classical department of Atatürk High School, where Latin was taught, in May 1943. In the fall of 1943, he began his medical studies at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena-Thüringen, Germany. After two semesters, in March 1945, he moved to Switzerland. He continued his medical studies at the University of Basel and graduated in the fall of 1949. For three months he studied brain anatomy at the Institute of Anatomy under Dr. Josef Klingler. After working as an assistant in neurology-psychiatry, internal medicine and general surgery for one year each between 1950 and 1953, he completed his residency in neurosurgery at the University of Zurich in January 1953 under Prof. H. Krayenbühl and Prof. G. Weber. In 1960 he became an associate professor, in 1965 a professor, in 1973 an ordinarius professor and served as director of the same clinic until 1993. In addition to routine neurosurgical work at the Neurosurgery Clinic of the University of Zürich, he performed cerebral angiography for the first 12 years (1953-1965) and stereotactic surgery for the treatment of Parkinson's disease and other movement disorders in 1957-1965. In Zürich, with the help of neurophysiologist Prof. Oscar Wyss, he used the high-frequency coagulation technique for the first time and this technique was accepted globally. Between October 1965 and December 1966, he learned microvascular surgery in the animal laboratory at the University of Burlington-Vermont in the USA under Prof. M.P.R. Donaghy and the operating nurse Mrs. Jackie Robert and applied this technique for the first time in animal brain vessels (500-1000 microns in diameter). In January 1967, he returned to the Zürich Clinic for Neurosurgery and began using microtechnics and the cisternal opening method in all brain and spinal cord surgery. This technique was routinely used for revascularization of the brain, aneurysms, AVMs, cavernomas, extra-axial and intra-axial cerebrospinal tumors and temporal epilepsy surgery, opening a new era in neurosurgery. He founded the microsurgery laboratory in Zurich and taught microsurgery techniques to more than 3000 surgeons from five continents between 1968 and 1993. He retired as chief of the Neurosurgery Clinic at the University of Zurich in January 1993. In October 1994, he was given a professorship at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, USA, where there is no age limit. In this hospital, he performed surgeries, gave lectures, published, established a microneurosurgery laboratory and prepared microneurosurgery courses. He retired from Arkansas University in October 2013. Since November 2013, Professor Yaşargil has been continuing his surgical studies, lectures, conferences, laboratory studies and professional publications at Yeditepe University Faculty of Medicine. Microsurgery laboratories have been established under Professor Yaşargil's name in Oxford-UK, Little Rock-USA and Beijing-China. The University of Arkansas honored his work by establishing the "Yaşargil Chair" and holding the "Gazi and Dianne Yaşargil Annual Conference". In November 2014, the Swiss Medical Faculty of Zurich initiated the "Annual Yaşargil" conferences, honoring Yaşargil's work and contributions at the University of Zurich.