Frederick Sanger (1918–2013) was a British biochemist who invented practical methods for protein and DNA sequence analysis. Born in Gloucestershire, he completed his doctorate in biochemistry at Cambridge in 1943. He investigated the structure of the insulin molecule, and established its complete amino acid sequence in 1955, by what were then tedious methods of sequential chemical analysis. His work demonstrated that any particular protein possesses an exact chemical structure with a specific sequence of amino acids, rather than an irregular or variable composition. For this achievement, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1958.
Sanger joined the Medical
Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in
Cambridge in 1962 and turned his attention to nucleic acids.
In 1977, he and his colleagues at the MRC Lab of Molecular
Biology introduced an improved method of DNA sequencing
method that uses dideoxynucleotides to terminate DNA
synthesis at specific bases. The first complete genome of
an organism completed was the 5,386 bp genome of bacteriophage
φ³Ý174. Sanger shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
with Walter Gilbert and Paul Berg, and became the first person
to receive two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry. Successive
modifications of "Sanger Sequencing" including
use of fluorescent dyes, automation, and capillary
electrophoresis, established his method as the workhorse
technology for decades, and supplied much of the three billion
base pairs sequence information for the Human Genome Project.