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Fredrich Miescher
Johannes Friedrich Miescher was a Swiss physician and biologist. He was the first researcher to isolate and identify nucleic acid. Miescher isolated various phosphate-rich chemicals, which he called nuclein, from the nuclei of white blood cells in 1869 in Felix Hoppe-Seyler's laboratory at the University of Tübingen, Germany, paving the way for the identification of DNA as the carrier of inheritance. The significance of the discovery, first published in 1871 -
Frederick Griffith
Frederick Griffith was a British bacteriologist whose focus was the epidemiology and pathology of bacterial pneumonia. In January 1928 he reported what is now known as Griffith's Experiment, the first widely accepted demonstrations of bacterial transformation, whereby a bacterium distinctly changes its form and function. -
Max Delbruck
Max Delbrück, a German–American biophysicist, helped launch the molecular biology research program in the late 1930s. He stimulated physical scientists' interest into biology, especially as to basic research to physically explain genes, mysterious at the time. Formed in 1945 and led by Delbrück along with Salvador Luria and Alfred Hershey, the Phage Group made substantial headway unraveling important aspects of cell physiology. The three shared the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. -
Beadle and Tatum
George Beadle and Edward Tatum created and analyzed mutants of Neurospora, a fungus with a haploid genome (a bread mold). They produced some organisms with mutant genes, then crossed (or mated) those mutants with normal organisms. By doing that, they were able to show that the mutants had lost use of a specific gene that ordinarily facilitates one particular enzyme necessary to the production of arginine. -
Avery, McCarty, and Macleod
The Avery–MacLeod–McCarty experiment was an experimental demonstration, reported in 1944 by Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty, that DNA is the substance that causes bacterial transformation, in an era when it had been widely believed that it was proteins that served the function of carrying genetic information (with the very word protein itself coined to indicate a belief that its function was primary). It was the culmination of research in the 1930s and early 1940s. -
Edwin Chargaff
Erwin Chargaff was an Austrian biochemist who immigrated to the United States during the Nazi era and was a professor of biochemistry at Columbia University medical school. Through careful experimentation, Chargaff discovered two rules that helped lead to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. In 1952, he discovered that the amounts of adenine and thymine in DNA were roughly the same, as were the amounts of cytosine and guanine.This later became known as the third of Chargaff's rule -
Watson and Crick
Late in 1951, Crick started working with James D. Watson at Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, England. Using the X-ray diffraction results of Raymond Gosling and Rosalind Franklin of King's College London, given to them by Gosling and Franklin's colleague Maurice Wilkins, Watson and Crick together developed a model for a helical structure of DNA, which they published in 1953. For this and subsequent work they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962, -
Alfred and Martha
Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase suggest that only DNA is needed for viral replication. Using radioactive isotopes 35S to track protein and 32P to track DNA, they show that progeny T2 bacteriophage isolated from lysed bacterial cells have the labeled nucleic acid. Further, most of the labeled protein doesn’t enter the cells but remains attached to the bacterial cell membrane. -
Paul Berg
Paul Berg is an American biochemist and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980, along with Walter Gilbert and Frederick Sanger. The award recognized their contributions to basic research involving nucleic acids. Berg received his undergraduate education at Penn State University, where he majored in biochemistry. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Case Western Reserve University in 1952. -
Mattew and Frank
The Meselson–Stahl experiment was an experiment by Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl in 1958 which supported the hypothesis that DNA replication was semiconservative. In semiconservative replication, when the double stranded DNA helix is replicated each of the two new double-stranded DNA helixes consisted of one strand from the original helix and one newly synthesized. It has been called "the most beautiful experiment in biology." -
Athur Kornberg
Arthur Kornberg was an American biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 for his discovery of "the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid " together with Dr. Severo Ochoa of New York University. He was also awarded the Paul-Lewis Award in Enzyme Chemistry from the American Chemical Society in 1951, L.H.D. degree from Yeshiva University in 1962, as well as National Medal of Science in 1979. -
Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins
In 1962 Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins jointly received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their 1953 determination of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The molecule that is the basis for heredity, DNA, contains the patterns for constructing proteins in the body, including the various enzymes. -
Marshall Nirenberg
Marshall Warren Nirenberg was an American biochemist and geneticist. He shared a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 with Har Gobind Khorana and Robert W. Holley for "breaking the genetic code" and describing how it operates in protein synthesis. In the same year, together with Har Gobind Khorana, he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University. -
Kary Mullis
Kary Banks Mullis is a Nobel Prize-winning American biochemist, author, and lecturer. In recognition of his improvement of the polymerase chain reaction technique, he shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Michael Smith and earned the Japan Prize in the same year. The process was first described by Kjell Kleppe and 1968 Nobel laureate H. Gobind Khorana, and allows the amplification of specific DNA sequences. -
Stanly Cohen and Herb Boyer
Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen combined their efforts in biotechnology to invent a method of cloning genetically engineered molecules in foreign cells. By this discovery and its applications Boyer and Cohen initiated what is now the multibillion-dollar biotechnology industry. Their collaboration began at a conference in Hawaii in 1972, when Boyer was a biochemist and genetic engineer at the University of California at San Francisco, and Cohen was an associate professor of medicine at Stanford.
