Death of two pioneers
Frederick Sanger and Grigor McClelland have died
Frederick Sanger, the distinguished biochemist, and Grigor McClelland, a founding director of the Manchester Business School, have died.
They were both towering figures in their fields of endeavour and both, influenced by their Quaker backgrounds, were conscientious objectors in the second world war.
Frederick Sanger was the only chemist to have won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry twice, in 1956 and 1980, and was regarded as one of the greatest British scientists of his day.
He is considered the ‘father of genomics’ after pioneering methods to work out the exact sequence of the building blocks of DNA.
Frederick Sanger was brought up as a Quaker. As an undergraduate his beliefs were strongly influenced by his Quaker upbringing. He was a pacifist and a member of the Peace Pledge Union. In 1939 he was granted unconditional exemption from military service as a conscientious objector. Later in his life he refused to accept a knighthood for his services to science.
Grigor McClelland helped to pioneer business management as an academic discipline and was the founding editor of the Journal of Management Studies. He was also the author of many books on management.
An active Quaker, he served on the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust from 1956 to 1994 and was its chair between 1965 and 1978.
In the second world war Grigor McClelland served with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit on the frontline in north Africa. In 2003 he returned his CBE in protest at the invasion of Iraq only requesting its return when the troops withdrew in 2009.
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