Frederick Sanger

He was 40 in 1916 when he married Cicely, who was four years younger.

Sanger's father converted to Quakerism soon after his two sons were born and brought up the children as Quakers.

Sanger's mother was the daughter of an affluent cotton manufacturer and had a Quaker background, but was not a Quaker.

When Sanger was around five years old the family moved to the small village of Tanworth-in-Arden in Warwickshire.

The family was reasonably wealthy and employed a governess to teach the children.

Frederick Sanger (13 August 1918 – 19 November 2013) was a British biochemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry twice.

Frederick Sanger was born on 13 August 1918 in Rendcomb, a small village in Gloucestershire, England, the second son of Frederick Sanger, a general practitioner, and his wife, Cicely Sanger (née Crewdson).

He was one of three children.

His brother, Theodore, was only a year older, while his sister May (Mary) was five years younger.

His father had worked as an Anglican medical missionary in China but returned to England because of ill health.

In 1927, at the age of nine, he was sent to the Downs School, a residential preparatory school run by Quakers near Malvern.

His brother Theo was a year ahead of him at the same school.

In 1932, at the age of 14, he was sent to the recently established Bryanston School in Dorset.

This used the Dalton system and had a more liberal regime which Sanger much preferred.

At the school he liked his teachers and particularly enjoyed scientific subjects.

Able to complete his School Certificate a year early, for which he was awarded seven credits, Sanger was able to spend most of his last year of school experimenting in the laboratory alongside his chemistry master, Geoffrey Ordish, who had originally studied at Cambridge University and been a researcher in the Cavendish Laboratory.

Working with Ordish made a refreshing change from sitting and studying books and awakened Sanger's desire to pursue a scientific career.

In 1935, prior to heading off to college, Sanger was sent to Schule Schloss Salem in southern Germany on an exchange program.

The school placed a heavy emphasis on athletics, which caused Sanger to be much further ahead in the course material compared to the other students.

He was shocked to learn that each day was started with readings from Hitler's Mein Kampf, followed by a Sieg Heil salute.

In 1936 Sanger went to St John's College, Cambridge, to study natural sciences.

His father had attended the same college.

For Part I of his Tripos he took courses in physics, chemistry, biochemistry and mathematics but struggled with physics and mathematics.

Many of the other students had studied more mathematics at school.

In his second year he replaced physics with physiology.

He took three years to obtain his Part I. For his Part II he studied biochemistry and obtained a 1st Class Honours.

Biochemistry was a relatively new department founded by Gowland Hopkins with enthusiastic lecturers who included Malcolm Dixon, Joseph Needham and Ernest Baldwin.

Both his parents died from cancer during his first two years at Cambridge.

His father was 60 and his mother was 58.

As an undergraduate Sanger's beliefs were strongly influenced by his Quaker upbringing.

He was a pacifist and a member of the Peace Pledge Union.

It was through his involvement with the Cambridge Scientists' Anti-War Group that he met his future wife, Joan Howe, who was studying economics at Newnham College.

They courted while he was studying for his Part II exams and married after he had graduated in December 1940.

Sanger, although brought up and influenced by his religious upbringing, later began to lose sight of his Quaker related ways.

He began to see the world through a more scientific lens, and with the growth of his research and scientific development he slowly drifted farther from the faith he grew up with.

He has nothing but respect for the religious and states he took two things from it, truth and respect for all life.

He won the 1958 Chemistry Prize for determining the amino acid sequence of insulin and numerous other proteins, demonstrating in the process that each had a unique, definite structure; this was a foundational discovery for the central dogma of molecular biology.

At the newly constructed Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, he developed and subsequently refined the first-ever DNA sequencing technique, which vastly expanded the number of feasible experiments in molecular biology and remains in widespread use today.

The breakthrough earned him the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which he shared with Walter Gilbert and Paul Berg.

He is one of only three people to have won multiple Nobel Prizes in the same category (the others being John Bardeen in physics and Karl Barry Sharpless in chemistry), and one of five persons with two Nobel Prizes.