Frederick Sanger won the chemistry Nobel twice, first for proteins then DNA
Only three people have won two Nobel Prizes in the same category, and Frederick Sanger is one. First he proved proteins have exact, definite sequences by decoding insulin. Then he invented a way to read DNA that labs still rely on. Not bad for a student who struggled with physics and mathematics.
Rendcomb, a Gloucestershire village, is where Sanger arrived on 13 August 1918, the son of a doctor who had served as an Anglican medical missionary in China before converting to Quakerism and raising his children in that faith. After a Quaker preparatory school he thrived at the progressive Bryanston School. In 1936 he went to St John's College, Cambridge, where he found physics and mathematics hard, swapped physics for physiology, and eventually earned first-class honours in the young field of biochemistry. Both his parents died of cancer during his first two years there, and as a student he was a committed pacifist.
His PhD began in 1940 with a project on extracting edible protein from grass, which changed course within weeks. In 1943 he joined Charles Chibnall's group working on insulin. Before Sanger, many scientists assumed proteins were somewhat shapeless. By breaking insulin into fragments, tagging their ends with a reagent now named after him, and piecing the sequences together, he decoded its two chains, B in 1951 and A in 1952. This showed every protein has a precise chemical structure, a foundation for the central dogma of molecular biology, and it won him the 1958 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
In 1962 he moved to the top floor of the Medical Research Council's new Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge and led its protein chemistry division. Already experimenting with sequencing RNA, he went on to develop the first technique for sequencing DNA, which massively expanded what molecular biologists could attempt. That earned the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, shared with Walter Gilbert and Paul Berg.
The physicist John Bardeen and the chemist Karl Barry Sharpless are the only others with two prizes in one field, and just five people have ever won two Nobels. Sanger died on 19 November 2013.
Source: Frederick Sanger
