Sanger, Frederick (1918– )

English biochemist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1958 for determining the structure of insulin, and again in 1980 for work on the chemical structure of genes. He was the first person to be awarded the chemistry prize twice.

Sanger's second Nobel Prize was shared with two US scientists, Paul Berg and Walter Gilbert, for establishing methods of determining the sequence of nucleotides strung together along strands of RNA and DNA. He also worked out the structures of various enzymes and other proteins.

Sanger was born in Rendcombe, Gloucestershire, and studied at Cambridge, where he spent his whole career. In 1961 he became head of the Protein Chemistry Division of the Medical Research Council's Molecular Biology Laboratory.

Between 1943 and 1953, Sanger and his co-workers determined the sequence of 51 amino acids in the insulin molecule. By 1945 he had discovered a compound, Sanger's reagent (2,4-dinitrofluorobenzene), which attaches itself to amino acids, and this enabled him to break the protein chain into smaller pieces and analyse them using paper chromatography.

From the late 1950s, Sanger worked on genetic material, and in 1977 he and his co-workers announced that they had established the sequence of more than 5,000 nucleotides along a strand of RNA from a bacterial virus called R17. They later worked out the order for mitochondrial DNA, which has approximately 17,000 nucleotides.