Sanger, Frederick

Sanger, Frederick (săng`ər), 1918–, British biochemist, grad. Cambridge Univ. (B.A., 1939; Ph.D., 1943). He continued his research at Cambridge after 1943. He won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his studies on insulin, accomplishing the first determination of the amino acid sequence (primary structure) of a protein of the insulin molecule. In 1980, he shared the Nobel Prize (with Paul Berg and Walter Gilbert) for developing a method, important in recombinant DNA research, for rapidly determining the chemical structure of pieces of DNA.

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Sanger, Frederick

(born Aug. 13, 1918, Rendcombe, Gloucestershire, Eng.) British biochemist. Educated at the University of Cambridge, he thereafter worked principally at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge (1951–83). He spent 10 years elucidating the structure of the insulin molecule, determining the exact order of all its amino acids by 1955. His techniques for determining the order in which amino acids are linked in proteins made it possible to discover the structure of many other complex proteins. In 1958 he won a Nobel Prize for his work. In 1980 Sanger became the fourth person ever to be awarded a second Nobel Prize, which he shared with Paul Berg and Walter Gilbert (b. 1932), for determining the sequences of nucleotides in the DNA molecule of a small virus.

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Sanger, Frederick 

Born Aug. 13, 1918, in Rendcombe, Gloucestershire. British biochemist. Fellow of the Royal Society of London (1954).

Sanger graduated from Cambridge University in 1939 and received the Ph.D. degree there in 1943. In 1944 he became a member of the Medical Research Council at Cambridge and in 1951, head of the protein chemistry section of the molecular biology laboratory at Cambridge University. His research has dealt primarily with determining the molecular structure of proteins and nucleic acids. Sanger was the first to establish the primary structure of insulin, that is, the sequential arrangement of amino acids. He is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1958). Sanger was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1958.

WORKS

“Structure of Insulin.” In Symposia of the Society for Experimental Biology, 1955, vol. 9.