History of DNA by Jillian Hartshorn Per 1

Watson & Crick

1953 BCE

The discovery in 1953 of the double helix, the twisted-ladder structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), by James Watson and Francis Crick marked a milestone in the history of science and gave rise to modern molecular biology, which is largely concerned with understanding how genes control the chemical process.

Hershey & Chase

1952 BCE

The Hershey–Chase experiments were a series of experiments conducted in 1952 by Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase that helped to confirm that DNA is genetic material. While DNA had been known to biologists since 1869, many scientists still assumed at the time that proteins carried the information for inheritance because DNA appeared simpler than proteins. In their experiments.

Franklin & Wilkins

1950 BCE

The double helix model was supported by the work of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. on the helices: "The structure of DNA was discovered in 1953 by Francis Crick and James Watson while Watson lived here at Clare."

Chargaff

1947 BCE

Erwin Chargaff proposed two main rules in his lifetime which were appropriately named Chargaff's rules. The first and best known achievement was to show that in natural DNA the number of guanine units equals the number of cytosine units and the number of adenine units equals the number of thymine units.

Avery

1944 BCE

Oswald Theodore Avery Jr. ForMemRS was a Canadian-American physician and medical researcher. The major part of his career was spent at the Rockefeller University Hospital in New York City. Avery was one of the first molecular biologists and a pioneer in immunochemistry, but he is best known for the experiment (published in 1944 with his co-workers Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty) that isolated DNA as the material of which genes and chromosomes are made.

Griffith

1928 BCE

Griffith's experiment, reported in 1928 by Frederick Griffith, was the first experiment suggesting that bacteria are capable of transferring genetic information through a process known as transformation. Griffith's findings were followed by research in the late 1930s and early 40s that isolated DNA as the material that communicated this genetic information.

Miescher

1870 BCE

Miescher isolated various phosphate-rich chemicals, which he called nuclein (now nucleic acids), from the nuclei of white blood cells in 1869, paving the way for the identification of DNA as the carrier of inheritance. The significance of the discovery, first published in 1871, was not at first apparent, and it was Albrecht Kossel who made the initial inquiries into its chemical structure. Later, Friedrich Miescher raised the idea that the nucleic acids could be involved in heredity.