History of DNA

  • Law of Heredity by Johann Gregor Mendel

    Law of Heredity by Johann Gregor Mendel
    Gregor was an austrian monk who used pea plants to show that genes are what is inherited. Found that genes are the inherited factors passed down.
  • Isolation of nucleic acid

    Isolation of nucleic acid
    Friedrich identified DNA as a distinct molecule. He was an organic chemist. His discovery was incorrect because he was unsure about his information due to it being unavailable.
  • Oswald Avery

    Oswald Avery
    Avery was born in 1877 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He showed that Fred Griffith’s “transforming principle" was DNA.
  • Erwin Chargaff

    Erwin Chargaff
    Erwin Chargaff was an Austro-Hungarian biochemist born in 1905. Chargaff discovered two rules that helped lead to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.
  • Rosalind Franklin

    Rosalind Franklin
    Rosalind Franklin was born 1920 Notting Hill, London, United Kingdom. She was an English chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal, and graphite.
  • Martha Chase

    Martha Chase
    Martha was born November 30, 1927, Cleveland Heights, OH. She was an American geneticist who experimentally helped to confirm that DNA rather than protein is the genetic material of life.
  • Alfred Hershey

    Alfred Hershey
    He was born December 4, 1908, Owosso, MI. Alfred's contribution was the discovery that DNA, and not protein, was the genetic material in bacteriophage, a discovery based on evidence from the legendary "blender experiment" undertaken with Martha Chase in 1952.
  • James Watson and Francis Crick

    James Watson and Francis Crick
    These men came up with the structure of DNA called the double helix. They used stick and ball models to test their ideas on the possible structure of DNA. They shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962.