Frederick Sanger, 1918 – 2013

Twice Nobel laureate Frederick Sanger has died

<url>British biochemist Frederick Sanger, twice awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on the structure of insulin and for creating a method for reading DNA sequences, has died at the age of 95.

This is reported by the BBC (Frederick Sanger: Double Nobel Prize winner dies at 95). Details about the circumstances of the death are not given.

Sanger was born on August 13, 1918 in the British Rendcombe. In 1940, he graduated from Cambridge University and at the same time began working in the laboratory of Norman Peary, a biochemist who managed to crystallize the tobacco mosaic virus. Until 1983, Sanger remained in Cambridge, where he made all his major discoveries.

The British biochemist gained his first scientific fame by determining the structure of insulin. The scientist "read" one of the polypeptide chains of this hormone in 1951, and the second in 1952. This work was of key importance for understanding the structure of proteins and influenced the discovery of the genetic code. For this discovery, Sanger received the 1958 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Soon after, the biochemist switched to creating fundamentally different methods that are suitable for determining the sequence of nucleic acids. The DNA sequencing method he created was distinguished by a biochemical approach, in which, instead of purely "chemical" reagents, DNA polymerase isolated directly from living organisms was used. This determined the popularity of the method, which since its invention in 1977 has become virtually the standard in all molecular biology laboratories in the world. Only after the advent of "new generation sequencing" methods in the early 2000s, the use of the Sanger method began to decline. For its creation, the scientist received his second Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1980. Sanger shared it with Gilbert, a pioneer of an alternative (purely "chemical") approach, and Paul Berg, a specialist in recombinant DNA technology. In the history of the Nobel Prize, it was awarded twice, in addition to Sanger, only to three: Marie Curie, Linus Pauling and John Bardin.

Sanger left science at the age of 65 and devoted himself to his family and sailing hobby. He refused to be knighted, because of his unwillingness to be called "sir". The British Genomic Institute of the Wellcome Trust Foundation is named after Sanger.

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