Fred Sanger, 1918-2013

Double Nobelist Frederick Sanger has died at 95. He is, of course, the pioneer in both protein and DNA sequencing, and he lived to see these techniques, revised and optimized beyond anyone's imagining, become foundations of modern biology. When he and his team determined the amino acid sequence of insulin in the 1950s, no one was even sure if proteins had definite sequences or not. That work, though, established the concept for sure, and started off the era of modern protein structural studies, whose importance to biology, medicine, and biochemistry is completely impossible to overstate. The amount of work needed to sequence a protein like insulin was ferocious - this feat was just barely possible given the technology of the day, and that's even with Sanger's own inventions and insights (such as Sanger's reagent) along the way. He received a well-deserved Nobel in 1958 for having accomplished it. In the 1970s, he made fundamental advances in sequencing DNA, such as the dideoxy chain-termination method, again with effects which really can't be overstated. This led to a share of a second chemistry Nobel in 1980 - he's still only double laureate in chemistry, and every bit of that recognition was deserved.
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Chemical News Source Type: blogs