What is Frederick Sanger famous for?
Well, I'm primarily known for two things in the laboratory. The first was determining the complete amino acid sequence of insulin. That took a good deal of methodical work, breaking down the protein into smaller fragments and then painstakingly figuring out the order of the amino acids in each piece. Later, my group developed a way to determine the sequence of nucleotides in DNA. It seemed like a sensible thing to try, using enzymes to copy a DNA strand and incorporating labelled nucleotides. This method, the Sanger method as it became known, was crucial for later advances in understanding genetic material.
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