A molecular biologist, Ingram was born in Germany and studied in England. In 1952, while studying protein chemistry — particularly the genetics of hemoglobin — at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, Ingram discovered that a simple mutation was the cause of sickle cell anemia, a serious blood disease.
That discovery led to more work which found many other diseases, from hemophilia to cystic fibrosis, are similarly caused by single-gene mutations. The discovery was “one of the absolutely seminal discoveries in the history of molecular biology,” said Graham C. Walker, a biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Ingram went to teach in 1958. Ingram never retired from MIT: in recent years, he had been working on researching Alzheimer’s disease. “He was a dyed-in-the-wool, inveterate experimentalist,” Walker said. “He was going at full speed right up until the end.” Dr. Ingram died August 17 after being injured in a fall. He was 82.