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Frederick Sanger: Method Man, Problem Solver
Method
man. The brilliance of Frederick Sanger's work lies not
in what he discovered but in how he discovered it. A skilled experimentalist, he
developed novel techniques for sequencing proteins and DNA that revolutionized
science and are still in use today.
An
average student. Frederick Sanger was born on August 13, 1918, in Rendcombe, England,
to a physician father and the wealthy daughter of a cotton manufacturer. As a
child he enjoyed carpentry, but his father's love of science sparked his
interest and he enrolled at the University
of Cambridge to study
chemistry and physics. He was an average student and found physics too
difficult; therefore, he took up physiology and enrolled in a brand new course
called "biochemistry," where he excelled.
Insulin. Sanger earned his
Ph.D. by studying the metabolism of the amino acid lysine, and then he moved on
to the study of insulin. Proteins like insulin are made up of chains of amino
acids. Sanger was given the challenge of determining insulin's amino acid sequence,
which had never been done before. Using chemistry and chromatography, and by
mixing standard techniques with novel ones, he developed a method to read the
amino acid sequence of insulin and found that this protein is actually made up
of two amino acid chains linked together by disulphide bonds.
Nobel
Prize, take one. It often takes many years, and sometimes even
decades, before a scientist's work is recognized as ground breaking. Sanger,
however, did not have to wait long. As soon as his discovery was published, the
study of proteins was revolutionized, and Sanger was awarded the 1958 Nobel
Prize in chemistry a mere three years after his publication.
The
Sanger Method. The next major chapter in Sanger's life began in
1962 when he joined the Medical Research Council (MRC) and worked with researchers,
such as Francis Crick, who were studying DNA. Crick's enthusiasm for the
subject was mesmerizing and soon Sanger had left the study of proteins for the
challenge of sequencing DNA. Once again, Sanger combined the old with the new
and developed an original DNA sequencing method, now known as the Sanger
Method. In 1977, he and his colleagues published the sequence of a virus genome
of over 5,000 base pairs.
Nobel
Prize, take two. Use of the Sanger Method became widespread and
commonplace in molecular biology. It has since been automated and computerized;
it was used in the Humane Genome Project. In 1980, Sanger was awarded his
second Nobel Prize in chemistry for his contributions to the study of DNA.
Leaving
the bench. Sanger considers himself an experimentalist rather
than a theoretician, always feeling more at home at the bench than writing or
teaching. He retired in 1983 and has been enjoying gardening and boating with
his wife and three children ever since. The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
near Cambridge
is named for him and continues large-scale genome research.
This page appears in the eBook Essentials of Genetics, Unit 4.2
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