Happy 90th To The Greatest Living Briton

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