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Presentation of the 1994 Beckman-ABRF Award to Dr. Frederick Sanger (center) by Gregory A. Grant, (left) President of the ABRF and James C. Osborne, (right) Vice President Advanced Development Unit, Beckman Instruments, Inc. (Photograph compliments of Ron Niece)
The Beckman-ABRF Award was established with the generous and enthusiastic support of Beckman Instruments for the purpose of recognizing outstanding contributions specifically to the development of methodology or instrument technology in the biological sciences. The inaugural awardee was Dr. Fred Sanger who was head of the Molecular Biology Division, Medical Research Council Laboratories, Cambridge University. He is one of only a very small number of scientists who have ever been awarded the Nobel Prize on two separate occasions. The first was in 1958 for his contributions to protein sequencing chemistry. Dr. Sanger's contributions to these methodologies have had a major impact on their routine use today in the biological sciences. Dr. Sanger was the first to determine the amino acid sequence of a protein. The protein was bovine insulin and the procedure employed 2,4-dinitrobenzene, later to be known as Sanger's reagent. Among other things, Dr. Sanger's work proved that proteins were linear chains and that a protein could be made up of more than one chain. Most important, he showed that the end of a protein could be labeled with a reagent that could withstand the conditions needed to break the peptide bond. In the course of his work he also demonstrated how the chains could be separated by developing methods for breaking disulfide bonds, and he proved that enzymes could in fact cut peptide chains at predictable sites. In effect, these accomplishments provided much of the basis for the later development of our modern protein sequencing methodologies.
In the 1970's Dr. Sanger developed a method for sequencing DNA and in 1977 the method was perfected and Sanger dideoxy sequencing is now the standard procedure not only for molecular biologists but also for protein chemists employing site directed mutagenesis to modify proteins. And of course, it brought the second Nobel Prize. Along the way, he also demonstrated the existence of overlapping genes and discovered, along with his colleague Kjeld Marcker, the initiator formyl-methionyl tRNA.
In making their decision, the Beckman-ABRF Award Committee stated, "Frederick Sanger has made fundamental contributions to both protein sequencing and DNA sequencing - two fields of great importance to the ABRF membership. Moreover, he has been a trend setter for methods development in both areas. He is a "scientist's" scientist who has brought legitimacy to the development of new technologies as a scientific discipline".
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