Which scientist won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for determining the structure of insulin?

Frederick Sanger won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for determining the structure of insulin.

Sanger’s achievement was the first complete determination of the amino-acid sequence of a protein. Working mainly with bovine insulin, he developed chemical methods to identify the order of amino acids in its two linked chains. This established that proteins have precise, information-rich sequences rather than being random chemical mixtures.

Insulin is a peptide hormone that helps regulate blood glucose. Sanger’s work also helped establish methods later used in protein chemistry and molecular biology. He shared the 1958 prize with no one. A frequent confusion is that Dorothy Hodgkin determined insulin’s three-dimensional structure by X-ray crystallography much later; Sanger determined its amino-acid sequence, a different but foundational problem.