Fred Sanger (1918-2013) was one of Cambridge’s most illustrious sons, yet his name and achievements are not as well known as many other famous scientists who have made momentous discoveries. Partly this is because of his modest self-effacing manner and partly because he was interested in developing methods. Methods are sometimes ephemeral and get improved whilst discoveries endure. In his recent book on Fred Sanger, Professor George Brownlee will explain how his persistence and imagination allowed him to solve two basic problems in Molecular Biology -problems seen by others as unsolvable at the time he embarked on them. He worked out how to sequence proteins by 1955, gaining a first Nobel Prize in 1958, and then turned his attention to sequencing RNA and DNA for which he obtained his second Nobel Prize in 1980. He is the only British scientist to achieve such a distinction.
