British biochemist Frederick Sanger, known as the "father of genomics" and the only person to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry twice, has died at the age of 95, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute confirmed on Wednesday.

Born on August 13, 1918, Sanger first won the prize in 1958 for his work on the structure of proteins, notably insulin, and shared it with two others in 1980 for pioneering developments in DNA sequencing that are still being used today.

Sanger died on Tuesday morning at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, eastern England, according to a spokesman for the Medical Research Council.

His colleagues described him as an inspiration: a doggedly determined but self-effacing scientist whose contribution to modern genetics and molecular biology is impossible to overstate.