Frederick Sanger develops rapid DNA sequencing

In 1977 the British biochemist Frederick Sanger and colleagues in Cambridge published a method for determining the sequence of the letters of DNA, using chemically modified building blocks that stop the copying of a DNA strand at each of the four bases, producing fragments of all lengths that can be separated by size. They used it to read the first complete genome of an organism, the virus phiX174, which had 5,386 bases. Automated Sanger sequencing was the method that read the human genome. Sanger had already won a Nobel Prize in 1958 for the sequence of insulin, and won a second, in 1980, for this method.

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