Fred Sanger, Double Nobel Laureate: A Biography, by George G. Brownlee. 2014. Cambridge University Press
- Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, Singapore 138673
- Corresponding author: sydney.brenner{at}hotmail.com
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
George Brownlee, the author of this book, joined Fred Sanger as a research student in 1963 in the then new MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Fred had decided to start work on sequencing nucleic acids and Brownlee was asked to try to purify phenylalanine transfer RNA. The transfer RNAs were chosen because they were small molecules and could be purified from natural sources. Although he failed in this task, Brownlee continued working on sequencing methods using the 5S RNA of E. coli, which could be labeled with radioactive phosphate and the relatively small amounts easily purified. In his previous work, Fred had tried to develop radioactive methods for sequencing proteins because these methods reduced the amount of pure material required for the task. He knew that only a few proteins were available in the gram quantities required for the methods he developed with insulin. Furthermore, the protein …
