Fred Sanger's scientific legacy has been safeguarded.

The Biochemical Society has received the 100th Wellcome Trust Research Resources in Medical History grant to catalogue its archive and make its extensive materials available to the public.

Arguably the most important part of the archives is the set of 35 laboratory notebooks of Fred Sanger, double Nobel Prize winner and father of genome sequencing. The notebooks date from 1944 to 1981, providing a full record of his groundbreaking experiments on sequencing and the structure of proteins, which earned him his first Nobel Prize in 1958, and on the sequencing of nucleic acids, for which Sanger was awarded his second Nobel Prize in 1980.

Sanger's DNA-sequencing technique continues to be used to this day by scientists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, aptly named after the man himself.

Sanger made the generous donation of his personal notebooks to the Biochemical Society in May 2005, and the materials reveal moments of excitement and disappointment in a result – remarks such as "this was a total waste of time…will start again" are typical.

Plans are now underway to catalogue the archive; it will eventually be housed in the Wellcome Library (but will still be owned by the Biochemical Society).