Sanger

Sadly Fred Sanger, one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century passed away this week. He was awarded two Nobel prizes, for discovering the first chemical structure of a protein (insulin) and developing Sanger sequencing, which is used to read DNA. We had a course visit to the Sanger institute shortly after he passed away, so there was a strange atmosphere and a service going on at the same time. This photo is a small section of a banner which shows part of the sequence of the human X chromosome. It was about 1m wide and 10m high, printed with a font smaller than most books. It would take 150 of those banners to show the X chromosome, and over 2000 to show the genome. Fred Sanger's method read it all. Rest in peace.

Bye Barbara