Alan Coulson

Alan Coulson (born 1947) is a British biotechnology pioneer and genome scientist. He is best known for his work on developing DNA sequencing technologies with Frederick Sanger and his contributions to the Caenorhabditis elegans and human genome projects.

Biography Alan Coulson was born in Cambridge in 1947 and as a youth attended the Cambridge Grammar School for Boys and subsequently the Deacon's School in Peterborough. He achieved his higher national diploma in Applied Biology from Leicester Polytechnic in 1967.

Career Coulson joined Sanger's group at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) as a technician in 1967, shortly after receiving his diploma. With Sanger, Coulson developed many of the early DNA sequencing technologies, including the DNA polymerase primed synthesis ("plus and minus") technique and, eventually, dideoxynucleotide chain-terminating sequencing, which was later termed Sanger sequencing.

Coulson left the Sanger Center (by then renamed the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute) in 2003 and returned to work at the LMB until his retirement in 2007.