Abstract
Fred Sanger was born on August 13, 1918, in Rendcomb , Gloucestershire, England, one year after his brother Theodore (Theo) . They lived in The Old House down the hill from Rendcomb village (Fig. 2.1). The River Churn, little more than a large creek at this point, flowed by the house.
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Notes
- 1.
Both Fred and Theo related the story of their parents’ meeting when Cicely had a septic finger during a visit to Syde. No doubt that was the family story later told to the boys. Dr. Sanger’s diaries, however, told the story related here. The septic finger episode happened over a long period in 1919, after Fred was born.
- 2.
Parents National Education Union, founded by Charlotte Mason, stressed short fun lessons with afternoon walks outside and habit training—attention, truthfulness, neatness, kindness, punctuality, etc. [8].
- 3.
Alan Hodgkin, 1963 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine attended The Downs, leaving just as Fred Sanger was beginning. The poet W. H. Auden taught English at The Downs 1932–1935 [9].
- 4.
Spillikins is pick-up sticks or jackstraws.
- 5.
Helen Parkhurst pioneered the Dalton Plan in Dalton, Massachusetts, USA. She believed “The true business of school is not to chain the pupil to preconceived ideas, but to set him free to discover his own ideas and to help him to bring all his powers to bear upon the problem of learning” [16].
- 6.
A small piece of ground in or near town where one can grow vegetables and flowers.
- 7.
Fives is a derivative of Eton Fives, a hand ball game played as doubles on a three-sided court, with one wall having a buttress. The game originated outside Eton Chapel, thus the buttress [18].
- 8.
The first motto is from Robert Browning’s Red Cotton Night-Cap Country; the second is from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.
- 9.
Tripos is the exam pattern necessary for a B.S. honors degree at Cambridge. Part 1 study normally takes two years, Part 2 a third.
- 10.
Dick Shepherd, a popular Church of England priest, started the PPU. He asked mostly men to “renounce war and never again to support another” by signing a pledge. In a few months of 1934–35, more than 30,000 signed [21].
- 11.
Christiaan Eijkman “for his discovery of the antineuritic vitamin” and Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins “for his discovery of the growth-stimulating vitamins” shared the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine [26].
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Jeffers, J.S. (2017). Early Life 1918–1943 . In: Frederick Sanger. SpringerBriefs in Molecular Science(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54709-1_2
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