Fred Sanger Biography

Fred Sanger 1958                 Fred Sanger 1980

Fred Sanger, son of Frederick Sanger, was born in Rendcombe, Gloucestershire on 13 August 1918. His father was a medical practitioner, and between his father and older brother he became interested in biology. He had intended a study in medicine, but decided that he would rather concentrate his activities on a single goal, which wasn’t really possible as a medical practitioner. Rather, he studied science at Cambridge where he received a B.A degree by 1939.

He stayed on in Cambridge, and during the war started work on his PhD, through which he won his first Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1958 “for his work on proteins, particularly that of insulin” when he used new methods for sequencing amino acids to deduce the complete sequence of insulin.

In 1962 he moved into the new molecular lab at Cambridge and began working on nucleic acids in earnest. Sanger shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980 with Paul Berg and Walter Gilbert for his “contributions concerning the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids”. In 1983, Sanger retired.

In 1992 the Sanger Institute was founded near Cambridge. The Sanger institute is one of the world’s most important centers for genome research and played a prominent role in sequencing the human genome.

Fred Sanger married his wife, Margaret Joan Howe in 1940, and was the father of two sons, Robin and Peter and a daughter, Sally Joan.

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