Frederick Sanger

In 1940, he got married to Margaret Joan Howe, after they met through the Cambridge Scientists' Anti-War Group. Fred and Margaret had two sons and one daughter.

In 1992, the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust established a genome research centre and named it as the ‘Sanger Center’ (now Sanger Institute) in honor of Frederick Sanger.

He passed away on 19 November 2013 in his sleep at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge.

He was born to Cicely Sanger and Frederick Sanger, a general practitioner of medicine on 13th August, 1918 in Rendcomb, a small village in England. Theodore, the eldest was older than him by just one year, and May, his sister, was younger to him by five years.

From the age of 5, Sanger received education from a governess. In 1927, he went to study at ‘Downs School’, a Quakers-run residential school.

In 1932, he joined the ‘Bryanston School’ in Dorset run under the Dalton system of education. The Dalton system provided a much more liberal forum, and Sanger started developing an interest towards scientific studies.

His father wanted him to practice medicine following in his footsteps, but he gravitated towards becoming a scientist. He initially concentrated towards chemistry and physics, but later got attracted to the comparatively new field of biochemistry.

He lost both his parents to cancer during his years as an undergraduate in Cambridge.

Sanger joined ‘St. John’s College’ at Cambridge to pursue undergraduate studies in natural sciences on 1936. At the beginning, he took courses on physics, chemistry, biochemistry and mathematics but on struggling with physics and mathematics, he took up physiology in place of physics.

He started his PhD by researching if edible protein could be obtained from grass, but later on changed his thesis after Albert Neuberger became his thesis advisor. In 1943, Charles Harington and Albert Charles Chibnall awarded him with a doctorate after examining his thesis titled ‘The metabolism of the amino acid lysine in the animal body’.

In 1943, he joined Albert Chibnall’s group, where the latter suggested he studied the insulin molecule. Although he had funded his own research until then, on joining Chibnall’s group, he received funding from ‘Beit Memorial Fellowship’ and the ‘Medical Research Council’.

During 1951-1952, he successfully mapped the complete amino acid sequence of the bovine insulin’s two polypeptide chains. This led the renowned biologist to prove that proteins have definite chemical composition and unique sequence.

He went from being an external staff to the Medical Research Council to becoming the head of their newly opened ‘Laboratory of Molecular Biology’s Protein Chemistry division in 1962. He began developing new methods for sequencing ribonucleotide fragments for deciphering the structure of RNA.

His work on the understanding of the insulin molecule led to the conclusion that all proteins have unique sequence and definite chemical compositions.

Sanger along with his group of colleagues sequenced the nucleotide sequence of the ribosomal RNA of Escherichia coli (a small RNA of 120 nucleotides), which led to a better understanding of the RNA molecule.

He was the developer of the process known as ‘Sanger Method’ for DNA sequencing, which later got utilized in DNA mapping for the Human Genome Project.