Lab Notebooks

Sanger’s scientific legacy saved by the Wellcome Trust

06/08/07. By the Wellcome Trust

The laboratory notebooks of double Nobel Prize winner and eminent scientist Fred Sanger have been safeguarded thanks to the commitment of funding from the Wellcome Trust.

The notebooks form part of the Biochemical Society's archive, which has recently received the 100th Wellcome Trust Research Resources in Medical History award to catalogue its materials to professional standards making them more widely available to the public and on the web.

As an extremely important snapshot of science history, Sanger's laboratory notebooks from 1944-1981 provide a full record of his ground-breaking experiments of sequencing and structure of proteins, notably insulin, which earned him his first Nobel prize in 1958; and on the sequencing of nucleic acids, for which Sanger was awarded his second Nobel prize in 1980.

Sanger made the generous donation of his personal notebooks to the Biochemical Society in May 2005. Dr John Lagnado, Honorary Archivist at the Biochemical Society, who collected the materials from Sanger's home, explains:

"Sanger wrote a short letter to the Biochemical Society in which he explained that he had found a note in his papers written to himself as a reminder his promise to donate his notebooks to the Society, at the time he retired. Shortly after receiving this I drove to his home in Cambridgeshire to collect the notebooks from his attic. When I arrived back that evening, I had a quick bite and spent most of that night and the following day poring over this incredible treasure trove."

http://genome.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTX042246.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Today as of 2009 scientist do not usually keep lab notebooks. After having a quick bite o/n the check the computer log for the sequenced genes.