28th November, ’13. Frederick Sanger,  one of the most celebrated scientists for discovering the genome sequencing technique  passed away  the 20th of November at the age of 95.  He twice won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. He was one of just four individuals to have been awarded two Nobel Prizes, the other three being  Marie Curie, Linus Pauling and John Bardeen.

He first won the Prize in 1958 at the age of 40 for his work on the structure of proteins. He had determined the sequence of the amino acids in insulin and showed how they are linked together. He later turned his attention to the sequencing of nucleic acids and developed techniques to determine the exact sequence of the building blocks of DNA. That led to his second Nobel Prize, awarded jointly in 1980 with Stanford University’s Paul Berg and Harvard University’s Walter Gilbert, for their work determining base sequences in nucleic acids.