edited by Frederick Sanger (Retired from Medical Res. Council Lab. of Molecular Bio., Cambridge) & Margaret Dowding (Retired from Medical Res. Council Lab. of Molecular Bio., Cambridge)

Frederick Sanger was born in 1918 in England. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1940, and obtained his Ph.D. in 1943 for work on the metabolism of lysine in the Department of Biochemistry, Cambridge University. He continued doing research in the Department until 1962, when he moved to the British Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He retired in 1983. Dr Sanger was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1954, awarded their Royal Medal in 1969, and the Copley Medal in 1977, and he gave the Croonian Lecture in 1975. He has honorary degrees from the Universities of Leicester, Oxford, Strasbourg and Cambridge. He has won many prestigious prizes and awards, including the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1958 and 1980. Dr Sanger was made a C.B.E. (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 1963, a C.H. (Companion of Honour) in 1981, and was awarded the O.M. (Order of Merit) in 1986.

This important volume is mainly concerned with the development of methods for “sequencing” — that is, determination of the order of the amino acids in proteins and of nucleotides in RNA and DNA. In 1943 the position of only one amino acid in a protein (insulin) was known, and Sanger's first paper resulted in finding a second amino acid. In his final paper in 1982 he describes the determination of a DNA sequence of 48,502 nucleotides. The papers describe the steady improvements in techniques, and exciting biological results revealed by the sequences.

• Proteins (19 papers, from 1945 to 1961)
• RNA (8 papers, from 1964 to 1972)
• DNA (21 papers, from 1973 to 1988)