Double Nobel Prize winner Frederick Sanger has died at the age of 95 after leading the way of research of the human genome, the University of Cambridge said on Wednesday, according to Reuters.
The British biochemist won his first Nobel Prize in 1958 for his work on laying out the structure of insulin. The second Nobel Prize was for his work on developing the raid method DNA sequencing, which is the main way of mapping the genome, Reuters reported.
A synthetic biology pioneer and founder of the J. Craig Venter Institute in the United States, Craig Venter, said Sanger, who is one of four people in history to ever receive the Nobel Prize twice, was the most important scientist of the 20th century, according to Reuters.
"He twice changed the direction of the scientific world, first with the sequencing of insulin...and second with his then new method of sequencing DNA," Venter said after learning of Sanger's death, according to Reuters."His contributions will always be remembered."
A former chief executive of Britain's Medical Research Center Colin Blakemore said Sanger was a "real hero" of 20th century science, and said there is no way of exaggerating how important his work has been to the field, according to Reuters.
"His invention of the two critical technical advances - for sequencing proteins and nucleic acids - opened up the fields of molecular biology, genetics and genomics," Blakemore told Reuters.
