I gave a short talk to a small
gathering for young doctors/dentist and med students from University of
Pittsburgh Medical School yesterday; twenty some of us all came from Taiwan, a
congenial getting together.
In talking about the evolution
of insulin in clinical practice, I mentioned Fred Sanger, who just died at age
of 95 in November 2013. He was the only
one ever awarded with Nobel Prizes in chemistry twice; one for the sequencing
the amino acids in protein (insulin), the second is sequencing the nucleic
acids in DNA (virus Phix 174). So he is
a man of sequence and of consequence.
Sanger’s sequence of amino
acids (primary structure of protein), coupled with Linus Pauling’s alpha helix
and beta sheet (secondary structure of protein) propelled and accelerated the protein
science. His contribution of genomic
research rivaled that of Watson and Crick.
As we know Walter Gilbert (who co-founded Biogen and other bio-tech co)
shared with him the Nobel Prize with a different technique of sequencing
nucleic acids, but Sanger’s method is more ingenious and efficient and was
still used during the early stage of the Human Genome Project. The Scientific American obituary said Sanger
is “Paul Dirac of chemistry”.
 |
| Fred Sanger |
I also showed many Power Point
“slides” of our garden; it is not entirely irrelevant as Fred Sanger spent the rest of
his long life gardening when he reached the mandatory retirement age (65)
in 1983, thus 30 years of gardening.
Another scientist-gardener is
William Lawrence Bragg, who remains the youngest Nobel laureate; he was awarded
at age of 25, shared with his dad. Bragg
law of x-ray diffraction made the development of x-ray crystallography possible,
greatly advancing the structural science.
Bragg’s
hobby is literature and gardening. He missed gardening when he moved
from Cambridge to London, so he worked as a gardener on the weekends. One day the old lady
(who hired Bragg as the gardener) commented to her guest (who was a faculty in
Cambridge University) that her weekend gardener seems very knowledgeable. The guest took a look into the garden and
recognized the gardener as the former director of the Cavendish Lab of
Cambridge University. This is also a story of
how a weekend gardener lost his job.
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