LONDON (Reuters) - Fred Sanger, a double Nobel Prize-winning British biochemist who pioneered research into the human genome, has died at the age of 95, the University of Cambridge said on Wednesday.

Sanger, who once described himself as "just a chap who messed about in his lab", worked with colleagues to develop a rapid method of DNA sequencing - a way to "read DNA" - which became the forerunner for the work on mapping the human genome.

He won his first Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1958 for work on determining the structure of insulin and the second 22 years later for his work on DNA, the material that carries all the information about how living things look and function.                                                                

Sanger first won the Nobel Prize in 1958 at the age of 40 for his work on the structure of proteins. He had determined the sequence of the amino acids in insulin and showed how they are linked together.

Sanger was born on Aug. 13, 1918, in Gloucestershire, southwestern England. While he initially planned to study medicine like his father, he switched fields and earned a degree in natural sciences from Cambridge University 1939. A conscientious objector in World War II, he went on to earn a PhD working on protein metabolism from the same university.

In addition to the Nobel Prizes, Frederick Sanger was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1954, Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1963 and the Order of Merit in 1986.

Sanger declined a knighthood, however, because he preferred not to be called "sir," according to the laboratory he helped found.

The laboratory praised Sanger, who died in his sleep Tuesday at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, as an "extremely modest and self-effacing man whose contributions have made an extraordinary impact on molecular biology."

Sanger was one of just four individuals to have been awarded two Nobel Prizes; the others being Marie Curie, Linus Pauling and John Bardeen.

Colin Blakemore, a Cambridge professor of neuroscience and philosophy said Sanger was "a real hero of twentieth-century British science", adding it was "impossible to exaggerate" the impact of his work on modern biomedical science.

His invention of the two critical technical advances - for sequencing proteins and nucleic acids - opened up the fields of molecular biology, genetics and genomics," he said in a statement responding to news of Sanger's death.

He died 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.