The notebooks used by Fred Sanger, Britain's most decorated scientist, to record experiments that won him two Nobel prizes have been saved for the nation.
The Wellcome Trust has stepped in to take possession of the books in which Sanger noted down the progress of research that led to his winning a chemistry Nobel prize in 1958 and a second in 1980, a chemistry double that has never been matched.
The 35 beige books - with yellowing pages and Sanger's careful blue-ink handwriting - give crucial insights into his thinking as he carried out work that transformed medical science, first by unravelling the structure of a protein, insulin, and later by working out the DNA of a living being, in this case a virus. Both were scientific firsts. The DNA techniques of Sanger - who will be 89 a week tomorrow - are now used by gene sequencers throughout the world. If his books were sold on the open market, they would be worth millions.
'Sanger was the father of genome sequencing,' said Clare Matterson of the Wellcome Trust. 'With his notebooks, we now have a clear record of his influences and thought processes. It would have been tragic if these notebooks had ended up outside Britain.'
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