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Fred Sanger was born in Rendcombe in Gloucestershire in 1918, and was educated at Bryanston School, and at St John’s College, Cambridge. He took his BA in Natural Sciences in 1939 and began research in 1940 as a PhD student in Cambridge University’s Department of Biochemistry, working with Dr Albert Neuberger on the metabolism of the amino acid lysine, obtaining his PhD in 1943. Charles Chibnall took over the Cambridge Chair of Biochemistry in 1943 and suggested that Sanger try to obtain a quantitative estimation and identification of the amino acids in insulin with free amino groups. Before he moved to Cambridge from London, Chibnall’s protein chemistry group had found this number to be appreciably larger than could be accounted for on the basis of lysines alone, and suggested that the balance was due to free primary amino groups at the ends of the chains, and hence that the total number of amino acids per insulin molecule was quite small. Sanger developed a new chromatographic method for determining end-groups and his results on the free amino groups of insulin were published in 1945. Exploiting the techniques further he determined the N-terminal sequences of the two insulin chains in 1949. The complete sequence of insulin was published in 1955. |
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From 1944 to 1951, Sanger was funded by a Beit Memorial Fellowship for Medical Research, and from 1951 he was a member of the external staff of the Medical Research Council. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1954, and in 1962 he became Head of the Division of Protein Chemistry at the newly built MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. (See continuation in the 1980 Prize.)
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