2-time Nobel winner

Dr. Frederick Sanger, a British biochemist, was a pioneer of genome sequencing. — British biochemist Frederick Sanger, who twice won the Nobel Prize in chemistry and was a pioneer of genome sequencing, has died at the age of 95.

His death was confirmed Wednesday by the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology — which Mr. Sanger helped found in 1962.

The laboratory praised Mr. Sanger, who died in his sleep Tuesday at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, as an “extremely modest and self-effacing man whose contributions have made an extraordinary impact on molecular biology.”

Mr. Sanger was one of just four individuals to have been awarded two Nobel Prizes; the others being Marie Curie, Linus Pauling and John Bardeen.

Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, called Mr. Sanger “the father of the genomic era.”

Mr. Sanger first won the Nobel 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 developing techniques to determine the exact sequence of the building blocks in DNA.

That work led to Mr. Sanger’s 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.

Venki Ramakrishnan, deputy director of the MRC Laboratory, said it would be “impossible to overestimate the impact” Mr. Sanger had on modern genetics and molecular biology.