Frederick Sanger, the British biochemist who twice won the Nobel Prize, has died at the age of 95.
Fellow researchers have described him as "one of the greatest scientists of any generation" and as "a real hero" of British science. He is considered the "father of genomics" after pioneering methods to work out the exact sequence of the building blocks of DNA. Dr Sanger also developed techniques to determine the structure of proteins. He was born in 1918 in Gloucestershire and initially planned to follow his father into medicine. However, he followed a career in biochemistry at the University of Cambridge.
He is the only Briton to win two Nobel Prizes and the only scientist to have been awarded the prize for Chemistry twice.
The first came in 1958 for developing techniques to work out the precise chemical structure of proteins.
Proteins are made up of amino-acids. Dr Sanger was able to determine which amino-acids and in what order were used to build the hormone insulin.
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Eddie
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