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Frederick Sanger: Nobel Prize winner dies at 95 | |
(35 minutes later) | |
Frederick Sanger, the British biochemist who twice won the Nobel Prize has died at the age of 95. | |
Fellow researchers have described him as "one of the greatest scientists of any generation" and as "a real hero" of British science. | |
He is considered the 'father of genomics' after pioneering methods to work out the exact sequence of the building blocks of DNA. | |
Dr Sanger also developed techniques to determine the structure of proteins. | |
He was born in 1918 in Gloucestershire and initially planned to follow his father into medicine. | |
However, he perused a career in biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. | |
He is the only Briton to win two Nobel Prizes and the only scientists to have been awarded the prize for Chemistry twice. | |
Dr Jeremy Farrar, the director of the medical research charity the Wellcome Trust, said: "I am deeply saddened to learn of the death of Fred Sanger, one of the greatest scientists of any generation and the only Briton to have been honoured with two Nobel Prizes. | |
"Fred can fairly be called the father of the genomic era: his work laid the foundations of humanity's ability to read and understand the genetic code, which has revolutionised biology and is today contributing to transformative improvements in healthcare." | |
Prof Colin Blakemore, the former chief executive of the UK Medical Research Council, said: "The death of a great person usually provokes hyperbole, but it is impossible to exaggerate the impact of Fred Sanger's work on modern biomedical science. | |
"His invention of the two critical technical advances - for sequencing proteins and nucleic acids - opened up the fields of molecular biology, genetics and genomics. | |
"He remains the only person to have won two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry - recognising his unique contribution to the modern world. | |
"Yet he was a disarmingly modest man, who once said: 'I was just a chap who messed about in his lab'. | |
"Fred Sanger was a real hero of twentieth-century British science." |