By all accounts, a gentle, self-effacing man, Frederick Sanger (1918 - 2013) was one of the giants of molecular biology. He won the Nobel prize TWICE! The first was awarded in 1958, for finding the amino acid sequence of insulin (the first protein to be sequenced). Sanger won his second Nobel Prize in 1980, for his efficient method of sequencing DNA (his group had sequenced the genome of bacteriophage phiX174, as well as being the first to sequence human genes from mitochondria). Sanger described himself as someone who just “messed about in his lab. This humble good man passed away in November 2013, at the age of 95.
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 00:30:00 +0000