The First Sequence: Fred Sanger and Insulin

FRED Sanger is an amazingly modest man, and his own retrospective, written after he retired, a delightful prefatory chapter for the Annual Reviews of Biochemistry, is called “Sequences, sequences, and sequences” (Sanger 1988). In it he describes the paths that led to the successful methods he developed for the sequencing of proteins, then RNA, and then DNA. What a career! Especially now, with the human genome largely finished, it is almost impossible to imagine a world without sequences of proteins and of nucleic acids. The fact that it has been only 50 years since Sanger showed that there was such a thing as the unique amino acid sequence of a protein seems amazing from where we now stand— sequences are such a dominant part of the world we work in today. Amazing, but perhaps not surprising, when we think of, say, the change in the power of computers that has occurred over just about the same time period. (I would love to be around, marbles intact, 50 years from now, to find out how the brain really works.)