John's College, Cambridge. By his own admission, Sanger was not a particularly apt student. Later in life he wrote in
Annual Review of Biochemistry that "I was not academically brilliant. I never won scholarships and would probably not have been able to attend Cambridge University if my parents had not been fairly rich."
Upon arriving at Cambridge and laying out his schedule of courses, Sanger found that he needed one more half-course in science. In looking through the choices available, Sanger came across a subject of which he had never heard--biochemistry--but that sounded appealing to him. "The idea that biology could be explained in terms of chemistry," he later wrote in Annual Review of Biochemistry, "seemed an exciting one." He followed the introductory course with an advanced one and eventually earned a first-class degree in the subject.
Sanger rapidly discovered his strengths and weaknesses in science. Although he was not particularly interested in or skilled at theoretical analysis, he was a superb experimentalist. He found that, as he later observed in Annual Review of Biochemistry, he could "hold my own even with the most academically outstanding" in the laboratory. This observation was to be confirmed in the ingenious experiments that he was to complete in the next four decades of his career.
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