Nobel Peace Prize

Nobel Peace Prize - 1958

Frederick Sanger, was born on August 13, 1918 at Rendcombe, Gloucestershire, England. Sanger was educated at Bryanston School and then got his Bachelor of Arts in Natural Sciences at St John's College, Cambridge. He originally intended to study medicine, but became interested in biochemistry as some of the leading biochemists in the world were at Cambridge at the time which lead him to receive his Ph. D. degree in 1943 from the University of Cambridge. He was then offered biochemistry department of Cambridge headed up by A. C. Chibnall. Later in 1951, he joined the staff of the Medical Research Council and became one of the heads of the Council's molecular biology laboratory at Cambridge in 1961. Sanger then later retired, from the Medical Research Council in 1983. Later in Sanger's life he married Margaret Joan Howe and she bared him two sons, Robin and Peter Sanger, and one daughter, Sally Joan Sanger. Sanger spent 10 years elucidating the structure of the bovine insulin molecule, and by 1955 he had determined the exact order of all that molecule's amino acids. In doing so, he proved that proteins have specific structures. He began by degrading insulin into short fragments by mixing the trypsin enzyme (which splits protein) with an insulin solution. He then applied a spot of the mixture to a sheet of filter paper. He passed a solvent through the filter paper in one direction, and passed an electric current through the paper in the opposite direction. Depending on their solubility and electric charge, the different fragments of insulin moved to different positions on the paper, creating a distinct pattern. Sanger called these patterns "fingerprints". Like human fingerprints, these patterns were characteristic for each protein, simple and reproducible. He reassembled the short fragments into longer sequences to deduce the complete structure of insulin. Sanger concluded that the protein insulin had a precise amino acid sequence. It was this achievement that earned him his first Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1958. In developing the gene sequencing of Insulin he concluded that a molecule of insulin contains two peptide chains made of two or more amino acids that are linked together by two disulfide bonds. It took eight more years to finally identify the 51 amino acids that make up insulin. In 1975, he developed the chain termination method of DNA sequencing, also known as the Dideoxy termination method or the Sanger method. Two years later he used his technique to successfully sequence the genome of the Phage Φ-X174; the first fully sequenced genome. He did this by hand, without any automation. This has been of key importance in such projects as the Human Genome Project and earned him his second Nobel Prize in 1980. The Human Genome Project (HGP) was the international, collaborative research program whose goal was the complete mapping and understanding of all the genes of human beings. All our genes together are known as our "genome." Insulin is a hormone. And like many hormones, insulin is a protein. The Human Genome Project is expected to produce a sequence of DNA representing the functional blueprint and evolutionary history of the human species.