DNA genius and double Nobel Prize winner Fred Sanger dies aged 95

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/News/DNA-genius-and-double-Nobel-Prize-winner-Fred-Sanger-of-Cambridge-dies-aged-95-20131120113300.htm

by yread • 13 years ago

134 43 13 years ago

cambridge-news.co.uk

spodek• 13 years ago

According to Wikipedia, 835 Nobel Prizes have been awarded. Four people have won two awards.

Winning a first prize is huge. Something like one in ten million people get one.

But apparently winning a second one is easy -- better than one in a thousand get them. The Curie family has six!

(I hope that came out slightly funny and informative)

rangibaby• 13 years ago

The entire European Union got one too :-P

kitd• 13 years ago

Yeah, I'm still waiting for my 42 1/2 p

gilgoomesh• 13 years ago

Here's a tip: win the second one first, then work your way backwards to the first one.

verandaguy• 13 years ago

Computer scientists - who, of course, have a more thorough understanding of recursion - should have little trouble with this.

sakunthala• 13 years ago

Given that you're a doctor, I think the odds are on the order of around 1/3000 of winning the Nobel for medicine. So maybe that statistic doesn't say much for two-time winners!

dnautics6• 13 years ago

what is interesting is for the most part his first sequencing (protein sequencing) was made obsolete by his second sequencing (DNA sequencing).

hga• 13 years ago

I don't count Linus Pauling in the same company as the other three.

While he was the 20th Century's premier chemist, by being both absolutely brilliant, and getting his Ph.D. at just the right time to be the first to apply the then new and not yet completed quantum mechanics to chemistry, his second was the notoriously political Peace Prize, and he got that for being a prominent politically correct scientist at the right time.

arethuza• 13 years ago

Some great stuff on his Wikipedia page:

- "struggled with physics and mathematics" :-)

- "He agreed to having the Centre named after him when asked by John Sulston, the founding director, but warned, 'It had better be good.'"

- "My father was a committed Quaker and I was brought up as a Quaker, and for them truth is very important. I drifted away from those beliefs - one is obviously looking for truth but one needs some evidence for it. Even if I wanted to believe in God I would find it very difficult. I would need to see proof."

- 'He declined the offer of a knighthood as he did not wish to be addressed as "Sir"'

- "the most self-effacing person you could hope to meet"

I hope someone writes a good biography of him - I wonder if Andrew Hodges (who wrote 'Alan Turing: The Enigma') could be persuaded....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Sanger

jballanc2• 13 years ago

The early pioneers in genetics were all consummate hackers in the truest sense. For much of the work they were doing, the had very little information about the underlying processes to go on. The were, in effect, reverse engineering life.

It's also worth noting that Sanger's sequencing method, or variations on it, were still used decades later to produce the bulk of the human genome sequence. Only very recently have newer, faster, alternative methods been developed. Even so, Sanger sequencing is still used for smaller scale studies, and is simple enough that almost any modern biology lab can do it on their own (all you need is a thermocycler, some eppindorfs, a sequencing gel apparatus, some photographic film, and all the raw chemicals).

bionerd3• 13 years ago

The early pioneers in genetics were all consummate hackers in the truest sense. For much of the work they were doing, the had very little information about the underlying processes to go on.

Exactly! They only had the most basic tools (even primitive by today's standards!) at their disposal and were still able to discover the most profound and fascinating things about life at the molecular level. All that using only a few simple techniques and a pure deductive logic.

It never ceases to amaze me how much hacker spirit these people had.

dekhn6• 13 years ago

When I first learned about molecular biology (late 80s, while in high school), I immediately shifted my interest from just computers to computers and biology. I specifically told people at the time: "studying molecular biology is like being put in front of the world's largest and most complicated computer and being told 'we have no manual, and do not know how it even works, could you figure out by playing with it?'

It took many years for me to reconcile my hacker approach to life with the reality of scientific funding and the rate of progress in human diseases.

dnautics6• 13 years ago

although you're better off doing sanger by contract. Sanger sequencing costs about $3 a run for really reliable sequencing. Contemporary sanger will likely never be obsolete because for short runs ~1kb where you need to be ~100% sure there are no mistakes, the method is really unbeatable.

drcode2• 13 years ago

All you need is a thermocycler, some eppindorfs, a sequencing gel apparatus, some photographic film, and all the raw chemicals.

And brutal amounts of tedious, flawless precision (I have tremendous respect for people who can do this stuff...)

jballanc2• 13 years ago

...also known as graduate school. ;-)

Seriously, though, my wife used to work with alternative RNA bases. Localizing them to specific sequences required the most massive sequencing gels I've seen (at least 1m tall), and every surface in the lab had to be continually rinsed with dilute acid. It turns out, human skin contains bucket-loads of non-specific RNAses. Not a problem for most people who work with DNA, but can absolutely ruin a week or more's worth of work if you're in an RNA lab.

w1ntermute2• 13 years ago

For everyone reading this: if you are tired of making websites and iPhone apps for people to share their cat photos, and want to do something more consequential, consider going into computational genomics. Although Sanger sequencing was/still is used sometimes, the "next-gen" sequencing methods that have become centrally important over the last decade generate massive amounts of data that require a lot of computational analysis, something that most scientists in the field could use assistance with.

yread3• 13 years ago

I agree. They also need a lot of help with basic software engineering, versioning, specifications, databases, documenting....

w1ntermute2• 13 years ago

Exactly. Someone who is only considered mediocre in a software company will be seen as an amazing software engineer if they are working with scientists.

Many of these scientists are not using version control. They don't have proper websites for their software. The codebases are a mess, and the software is very buggy. This is all low-hanging fruit that most software developers will be able to fix (if the scientists whose code it is are amenable to those fixes - many times they are not).

a_bonobo• 13 years ago

It sounds as if http://www.software-carpentry.org might be something to join for most participants in this thread - a non-profit organization that runs bootcamps for scientists to learn proper coding, version control etc. I think they're always looking for more volunteers.

bthomas• 13 years ago

Well said. I work in the field and am looking for more hackers to join. I'm happy to talk with anybody that might be interested - email in profile

JunkDNA2• 13 years ago

Those iPhone apps for cat picture sharing are valued at over a billion dollars by the marketplace, so it's kind of hard for developers to ignore. Truthfully, most of us in the field of biomedical informatics would have much more lucrative careers applying our scientific skills to figuring out how to get more people to click on advertisements.

It's unfortunate because as I see it, most scientific software is universally awful. It suffers from poor usability, poor maintainability, poor stability. Whole swaths of software are abandoned because they were someone's PhD thesis and that person has since moved on. Another commenter here is right: version control, bug tracking, testing, etc... are all luxuries that are seldom employed.

Shameless plug: If you're a hacker and interested in this stuff and want to help, we're always looking for contributors for our open source biomedical data discovery framework: http://harvest.research.chop.edu/ We're trying hard to not do all the things I listed above.

davecap1• 13 years ago

Harvest looks very interesting! I'm a computational biologist in the field working on a startup called SolveBio (https://www.solvebio.com/). We're working on making the worlds biomedical data easily accessible to programmers and scientists. You might find it interesting and useful, especially to plug into Harvest.

thearn4• 13 years ago

It is kind of a sad commentary on the state of things when so many of the brightest and creative minds of a generation are squandering the most productive years of their life writing software to enhance marketing and targeted advertising. And that these are efforts valued on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars.

dekhn6• 13 years ago

And yet, by doing so, large piles of rational cash can be allocated to scientific research. See, for example, Gates Foundation, Rockefellar Foundation, Calico, etc.

kamjam• 13 years ago

I'm getting a lot of this feeling these days. This is an interesting post by the OP. I am going to investigate this more, it might up some avenues to explore further.

dnautics6• 13 years ago

the false assumption is that all effort in the sciences is not similarly squandered. I assure you, most of it is. At least when you're making a better platform for cat pictures, you are presumably giving someone what they want and making their life marignally lighter. So much science is basically just politically connected higher ups getting money thrown at them for pursuits that if you stopped and thought about you would realize they were not.even.worth.it, or, being chased after by the wrong researcher. And in the process, the poor grad student (or postdoc) is having the best years of their life ground down. In 97% of cases, I'd say the cat pictures are of better social benefit.

dnautics6• 13 years ago

What we need are tools that have a lot of input from people actually doing the wet work. The basics of how to do assemblies are more or less worked out, what we need are tools that actually fit with our workflow, and don't require us to kitbash pieces from different packages and have to run perl scripts to interconvert file formats.

oleganza• 13 years ago

How come he is a DNA genius if he couldn't find an anti-age solution?

amiramir• 13 years ago

Many years after he'd left, I went to the same "high school" as Fred Sanger. Our biology/science building was named after him. He visited the school every so often and was a very modest and entertaining man. You can get a tiny sense of him from this short video: https://www.bryanston.co.uk/podium/default.aspx?t=52562&a=47...

DNA genius and double Nobel Prize winner Fred Sanger dies aged 95

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