NOBEL FOUNDATIONFrederick Sanger, for whom Sanger sequencing and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the U.K. were named, was the only scientist to ever win two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry—first in 1958 and again in 1980. He died Tuesday (November 19) at the age of 95.
According to an obituary released by the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge, U.K., Sanger was born in 1918 and grew up planning to be a physician like his father. As an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, Sanger decided to pursue biochemistry instead, eventually completing a PhD in the laboratory of Albert Neuberger in the university’s biochemistry department. During his postdoctoral fellowship in the same department in Albert Charles Chibnall’s lab, Sanger sequenced the amino acids in the protein insulin. This work led to his first Nobel Prize in 1958.
From there, Sanger moved to the then-newly opened MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology in 1962 to lead the Protein and Nucleic Acid Chemistry Division, where he began to work on ...
