Sanger, Frederick [key], 1918–2013, British biochemist, grad. Cambridge (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. Sanger joined the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, England, in 1962, and in 1977 he became the first scientist to decode the genome of an organism when he sequenced a virus's DNA. That work also demonstrated that the virus had overlapping genes. In 1980, he shared the Nobel Prize (with Paul Berg and Walter Gilbert) for developing a method, important in genomic research and to the development of production of drugs by genetically modified organisms, for rapidly determining the chemical structure of pieces of DNA. The only person to receive two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, he has been called the father of genomics for his accomplishments in the sequencing of DNA. He retired in 1983.
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