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Friedrich Miescher
Miescher was the first to identify DNA as a distinct molecule. He isolated DNA from cell nuclei. He paved the way for identification of DNA as the carrier of inheitance. -
Linus Pauling
Linus Pauling founded the molecular biology of DNA due to his discovery of the spiral structure. He used X-ray technology in his experiment, making a model to align the phosphates in the center. His discoveries later contributed to Watson and Crick's findings of the double helix structure. -
Paul Berg
Paul Berg is best known for Recombinant DNA, which is DNA made artificially. He won the Nobel Prize for this. -
Frederick Griffith
Frederick Griffith showed that bacteria can get DNA through a process called transformation. His focus was the pathology of bacterial pneumonia. He used two strains of streptococcus pneumonia. -
Oswald Avery, Maclyn McCarty, & Colin McCleod
Avery was a pioneer in immunochemistry, but he is best known for his experiment that isolated DNA. Avery and his co-workers, McCarty and McCleod, worked with inheritance. McCarty and McCleod discovered the helical structure of DNA. Chromosomes were made in the experiment they performed. -
Erwin Chargaff
Chargaff discovered two important rules that led to the discovery of the double helix structure. Through careful experiments, he figured out that in DNA the number of guanine units is equal to the number of cytosine units, and the number of adenine units is equal to the number of thymine units. His second rule was that the relative amounts of guanine, cytosine, adenine and thymine bases vary from one species to another. This showed even more evidence that DNA was the genetic material. -
Alfred Hershey & Martha Chase
Hershey and Chase's experiment provided additional evidence that DNA was the genetic material for life, not proteins. They showed that when bacteriophages, infect bacteria, their DNA enters the host bacterial cell, but most of their protein does not. Even though their discovery did not prove that DNA is genetic material, it helped and added more evidence to the idea. -
Rosalind Franklin & Maurice Wilkin
They contributed to the discovery that was made by James Watson & Frances Crick. The discovery was that the DNA molecule is shaped like a double helix, or a twisted ladder. -
James Watson & Frances Crick
They solved the structure of the DNA molecule, a double helix. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962 for their discovery. -
Frederick Sanger
He made the discovery of the insulin molecule in 1958. In 1980, he collaborated with Paul Berg and Walter Gilbert on base sequences in nucleic acids. He won 2 Nobel Prizes, 1 for each of his contributions. -
Matthew Meselson & Franklin Stahl
They created the "Meselson- Stahl" experiment which supported Watson & Crick's hypothesis that DNA replication was semiconservative. This experiment is known as "the most beautiful experiment in biology". -
Barbara McClintock
She made a discovery in the 1940's and 1950's of mobile genetic elements, or "jumping genes". She won the Nobel Prize for her findings in 1983, which was decades after her discovery. -
Kary Mullis
He won the Nobel Prize in 1993 for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction, which is a simple technique that allows a specific stretch of DNA to be copied billions of time in a few hours. He co-won the Nobel Prize. -
J. Craig Venter
He led the first draft sequence of the human genome and assembled the first team to transfect a cell with a synthetic chromosome. He serves as the CEO of J. Craig Venter Institute.
