Tomorrow (August 13th) is the 90th birthday of the man that I consider the greatest living Briton, but it seems that most people haven't heard of him. He is, apparently since I haven't met him, extremely modest about his achievements but given that he is the only person alive to have won two Nobel Prizes and in fact the only person ever to have won two in Chemistry (1958 & 1980) it is fair to say that they are substantial. The first man to elucidate (in the 1950s) the primary structure -the order of amino acids which form its backbone - of a protein (insulin) and later on to develop one of the key methods of detemining the sequence of bases within DNA (the dideoxynucleotide method was the one - with modifications - used by the Human Genome Project [details here] to sequence human DNA).
It is fair to say that his impact upon science has been profound.
Happy 90th Birthday, Frederick Sanger OM CH CBE FRS
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Another contender of similar vintage would be Sir Andrew (AF) Huxley, OM FRS, ex-President of the Royal Society, who celebrated his 90th birthday just a few months ago*.
Huxley only has a single Nobel (for working out nerve conduction together with Alan Hodgkin), although he has frequently been tipped for a second one (for approximately the last 40 yrs...!) for his role in elaborating the predominant "sliding filament" theory of muscle contraction (the theory is also associated with the unrelated Hugh (HE) Huxley).
Anyway, if you wanted to name a "greatest living British scientist", it would be very, very, hard to split Fred Sanger and Andrew Huxley. Many scientists would probably vote for Huxley because he has been a more dominant figure in his discipline, and more prominent in "wider science" than Sanger. But Fred Sanger's achievement in inventing two of the key enabling technologies of modern biochemistry and molecular biology is certainly unique.
In terms of chemistry and "possible two prize people" the only slight parallels I can think of to Fred Sanger are the Americans Robert B Woodward (who got one Nobel and would almost certainly have got a second had he lived long enough) and Linus Pauling.
Pauling actually got two Nobels - a Chemistry Nobel and the Peace Prize - but arguably should have got two separate chemistry Nobels, one for his theoretical and experimental work on chemical bonds, and another for predicting the structures of the alpha helix and beta sheet in proteins (he got the 1954 Chemistry Prize on his own for the whole shebang). He could also have easily won a separate Medicine Nobel for being part of the discovery that sickle cell disease was due to an abnormal protein.
Getting back to Fred Sanger, one of my favourite facts about him is that he did not have any kind of grant or scholarship until he finished his PhD in his mid-20s. Prior to that he supported himself from family money. Incidentally, trade gossip frequently holds that Sanger is the most modest man ever to win one Nobel Prize, let alone two.
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*A good article covering Andrew Huxley's 90th birthday can be downloaded from the Physiological Society website here - warning, though, 3.5 MB PDF. Pages 37-38 are the Huxley bit.
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