Frederick Sanger

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Frederick Sanger

Born August 13, 1918 (1918-08-13) (age 89)
Gloucestershire, England
Nationality United Kingdom
Fields Biochemist
Institutions Laboratory of Molecular Biology
Alma mater St John's College, Cambridge
Notable awards Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1958)
Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1980)

Frederick Sanger, OM, CH, CBE, FRS (born 13 August 1918) is an English biochemist and twice a Nobel laureate in chemistry. He is the fourth (and only living) person to have been awarded two Nobel Prizes.

Contents

[edit] Early years

Sanger was born in Rendcomb, a small village in Gloucestershire, the second son of Frederick Sanger, a medical practitioner, and his wife, Cicely. He was born on August 13, 1918, and educated at Bryanston School and then completed his Bachelor of Arts in natural sciences from St John's College, Cambridge in 1939. Raised as a Quaker, he learned to abhor violence, and during the Second World War he was a conscientious objector, being allowed to continue his research for a PhD.

He originally intended to study medicine, but became interested in biochemistry because some of the leading biochemists in the world were at Cambridge at the time. He completed his PhD in 1943 under A. Neuberger, on lysine metabolism and a more practical problem concerning the nitrogen of potatoes. He went on to discover the structure of proteins, most famously that of insulin protein. He also contributed to the determination of base sequences in DNA

[edit] Research

Sanger determined the complete amino acid sequence of insulin in 1955. In doing so, he proved that proteins have definite structures. He began by degrading insulin into short fragments by mixing the trypsin enzyme (that hydrolyses the peptide/amide bonds between amino acids that make up the primary structure of proteins) with an insulin solution. He then undertook a form of chromatography on the mixture by applying a small sample of the mixture to one end of a sheet of filter paper. He passed a solvent through the filter paper in one direction, and passed an electric current through the paper in the opposite direction. Depending on their solubility and charge, the different fragments of insulin moved to different positions on the paper, creating a distinct pattern. Sanger called these patterns “fingerprints”. Like human fingerprints, these patterns were characteristic for each protein, and reproducible. He reassembled the short fragments into longer sequences to deduce the complete structure of insulin. Sanger concluded that the protein insulin had a precise amino acid sequence. It was this achievement that earned him his first Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1956.

In 1975, he developed the chain termination method of DNA sequencing, also known as the Dideoxy termination method or the Sanger method.[1] Two years later he used his technique to successfully sequence the genome of the Phage Φ-X174; the first fully sequenced DNA-based genome. He did this entirely by hand. This has been of key importance in such projects as the Human Genome Project and earned him his second Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1980, together with Walter Gilbert. The only other laureates to have done so were Marie Curie, Linus Pauling and John Bardeen. He is the only person to receive both prizes in chemistry. In 1979, he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University together with Walter Gilbert and Paul Berg, co-winners of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

[edit] Later in life

Frederick Sanger retired in 1983. In 1992, the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council founded the Sanger Centre (now the Sanger Institute), named after him. The Sanger Institute, located near Cambridge, England, is one of the world's most important centres for genome research and played a prominent role in sequencing the human genome.

Almost his only public utterance in two decades was to put his name to a letter by other UK Nobel laureates protesting about the Iraq war. Referring to his youthful conscientious objection, he said, "I still hate war. That is why I signed that letter".

In 2007 the British Biochemical Society was given a grant by the Wellcome Trust to catalogue and preserve the 35 laboratory notebooks in which Sanger recorded his remarkable research from 1958 to 1983. In reporting this matter, Science magazine noted that Sanger, "the most self-effacing person you could hope to meet," now was spending his time gardening at his Cambridgeshire home.[2]

Even in retirement Sanger has used his extensive knowledge of DNA to aid modern scientists and academics in their work.

[edit] Awards and honours

 This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please improve this article if you can (October 2007).
  • Frederick Sanger, Esq. (13 August 1918-1943)
  • Dr Frederick Sanger (1943-18 March 1954)
  • Dr Frederick Sanger, FRS (18 March 1954-1963)
  • Dr Frederick Sanger, CBE, FRS (1963-1981)
  • Dr Frederick Sanger, CH, CBE, FRS (1981-11 February 1986)
  • Dr Frederick Sanger, OM, CH, CBE, FRS (11 February 1986-present)
  • the only one of the four to win two nobel prizes 1958 Nobel Prize for "work on the structure of proteins, especially that of insulin"
  • 1980 Nobel Prize for "contributions concerning the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids"

[edit] References

  1. ^ Sanger F, Nicklen S, Coulson AR., DNA sequencing with chain-terminating inhibitors, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1977 Dec;74(12):5463-7
  2. ^ "A Life in Science" from the "Newsmakers" page edited by Yudhijit Bhattachjee, Science 317: 879, 2007

[edit] External links

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Nobel Prize in Chemistry Laureates

Edwin McMillan / Glenn T. Seaborg (1951) · Archer Martin / Richard Synge (1952) · Hermann Staudinger (1953) · Linus Pauling (1954) · Vincent du Vigneaud (1955) · Cyril Hinshelwood / Nikolay Semyonov (1956) · Alexander Todd (1957) · Frederick Sanger (1958) · Jaroslav Heyrovský (1959) · Willard Libby (1960) · Melvin Calvin (1961) · Max Perutz / John Kendrew (1962) · Karl Ziegler / Giulio Natta (1963) · Dorothy Hodgkin (1964) · Robert Woodward (1965) · Robert S. Mulliken (1966) · Manfred Eigen / Norrish / George Porter (1967) · Lars Onsager (1968) · Derek Barton / Odd Hassel (1969) · Luis Federico Leloir (1970) · Gerhard Herzberg (1971) · Christian B. Anfinsen / Stanford Moore / William Stein (1972) · E.O.Fischer / Geoffrey Wilkinson (1973) · Paul Flory (1974) · John Cornforth / Vladimir Prelog (1975)
Complete roster · 1901–1925 · 1926–1950 · 1951–1975 · 1976–2000 · 2001–present
v • d • e
Nobel Laureates in Chemistry

William Lipscomb (1976) · Ilya Prigogine (1977) · Peter D. Mitchell (1978) · Herbert C. Brown / Georg Wittig (1979) · Paul Berg / Walter Gilbert / Frederick Sanger (1980) · Kenichi Fukui / Roald Hoffmann (1981) · Aaron Klug (1982) · Henry Taube (1983) · Robert Merrifield (1984) · Herbert A. Hauptman / Jerome Karle (1985) · Dudley R. Herschbach / Yuan T. Lee / John Polanyi (1986) · Donald J. Cram / Jean-Marie Lehn / Charles J. Pedersen (1987) · Johann Deisenhofer / Robert Huber / Hartmut Michel (1988) · Sidney Altman / Thomas Cech (1989) · Elias Corey (1990) · Richard R. Ernst (1991) · Rudolph A. Marcus (1992) · Kary Mullis / Michael Smith (1993) · George Olah (1994) · Paul J. Crutzen / Mario J. Molina / Frank Rowland (1995) · Robert Curl / Harold Kroto / Richard Smalley (1996) · Paul D. Boyer / John E. Walker / Jens Christian Skou (1997) · Walter Kohn / John Pople (1998) · Ahmed Zewail (1999) · Alan J. Heeger / Alan MacDiarmid / Hideki Shirakawa (2000)
Complete roster · 1901–1925 · 1926–1950 · 1951–1975 · 1976–2000 · 2001–present