The English biochemist Frederick Sanger (born 1918) was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of the chemical structure of insulin and another one in 1980 for creating a way to sequence genes, paving the way for th e Human Genome Project and gene therapy. He is one of only four people to have won two Nobel Prizes.

Frederick Sanger, son of Frederick Sanger, a medical practitioner, was born at Rendcombe, Gloucestershire, on Aug. 13, 1918. Entering St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1936, he graduated with the degree of bachelor of arts (in natural sciences) in 1 939. In 1943 he received his doctorate of philosophy (in chemistry) with a thesis on lysine. He held a Beit Memorial Fellowship from 1944 to 1951 and then joined the staff of the Medical Research Council. He later became director of the Division of Protei n Chemistry in the Council's Laboratory for Molecular Biology at Cambridge.

Sanger worked entirely...