Frederick Sanger dies at 95; ‘father of the genomic era’ won 2 Nobels
British biochemist Frederick Sanger, who twice won the Nobel Prize in chemistry and was a pioneer of genome sequencing, has died in Britain. He was 95.
His death was confirmed Wednesday by the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, which Sanger helped found in 1962.
The laboratory praised Sanger, who died in his sleep Tuesday at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, as an “extremely modest and self-effacing man whose contributions have made an extraordinary impact on molecular biology.”
Sanger was one of just four people to have been awarded two Nobel Prizes; the others being Marie Curie, Linus Pauling and John Bardeen.
Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, called Sanger “the father of the genomic era.”
Sanger first won his first Nobel in 1958 at age 40 for his work on the structure of proteins. He had determined the sequence of the amino acids in insulin and showed how they are linked together.
He later turned his attention to the sequencing of nucleic acids and developing techniques to determine the exact sequence of the building blocks in DNA.
That work led to Sanger’s second Nobel in 1980, which he shared with Stanford University’s Paul Berg and Harvard University’s Walter Gilbert, for their work determining base sequences in nucleic acids.
Venki Ramakrishnan, deputy director of the MRC Laboratory, said it would be “impossible to overestimate the impact” Sanger had on modern genetics and molecular biology.
Sanger was born Aug. 13, 1918, in Gloucestershire in southwestern England. He initially planned to study medicine like his father, but switched fields and earned a degree in natural sciences from Cambridge University in 1939. A conscientious objector during World War II, he went on to earn a doctorate working on protein metabolism from the same university.
Sanger was made a fellow of Britain’s Royal Society in 1954 and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1963, and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1986.
Sanger declined a knighthood, however, because he preferred not to be called “sir,” according to the laboratory he helped found.
According to the Sanger Institute, when asked whether he would mind an institute’s being named after him, Sanger agreed — but said, “It had better be good.”
Sanger is survived by three children: Robin, Peter and Sally.
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