Sambrook was a true pioneer in a golden era of molecular biology. A proud Scouser, he completed his Bachelor of Science degree with first-class honors in 1962 at the University of Liverpool in the UK. As circumstance would have it, the distinguished Australian virologist Frank Fenner had at the same time embarked on a UK lecture tour during which he would encounter Sambrook on a visit to Liverpool. Sambrook, who even at a young age was unintimidated by status, asked a series of challenging questions after Fenner’s lecture. So impressed was Fenner that he offered Sambrook, then and there, a graduate PhD scholarship to join his laboratory at the Australian National University in Canberra. This would prove to be the beginning of not only a stellar career that would span over 50 years but also a lifelong affair with Australia, where he would come to live out his days. In his PhD thesis, titled The Genetics of Animal Viruses, Sambrook isolated and characterized conditional lethal mutants, including temperature-sensitive and host-range mutants, of mammalian poxviruses.
After completing his PhD in 1966, Sambrook returned to England, where he trained as a postdoctoral researcher with future Nobel Prize laureate Sydney Brenner at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. When he arrived, the genetic code had been completely solved, except for one codon: UGA. Within just a couple of years, Sambrook had determined that the function of UGA in Escherichia coli is in fact not to encode an amino acid; instead, it serves as a chain-terminating codon. With his findings published in Nature in 1967, the genetic code was finally complete, which helped to put Sambrook well and truly on the map as one of the most promising young molecular biologists of the time.
