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Gregor Mendel
Mendel discovered the fundamental laws of inheritance. He discovered that genes come in pairs and they are inherited from each parent -
Oswald Avery
Avery showed that Fred Griffith's "transformaing principle" was DNA. -
Rosalind Franklin
Franklin produced x-ray crystallography pictures of BDNA. In 1953, both Wilkins and Franklin published papers on their X-ray data in the same Nature issue with Watson and Crick's paper on the structure of DNA. She died of cancer in 1958 -
Franklin Stahl
In 1957, Stahl and Meselson developed the technique of density gradient centrifugation and used it to prove that DNA was replicated in a semi-conservative way, as predicted by Watson and Crick in their 1953 paper. -
Jacques Monod
Jacques Monod and François Jacob were the first to discover how genes were turned on and off -
Roger Kornberg
Roger Kornberg figured out the importance of histones to chromatin structure. In 1972, Kornberg went to the Medical Research Council in Cambridge for postdoctoral work in X-ray crystallography. -
Tomas Cech
Cech headed for the University of California at Berkeley for graduate work. Here he discovered the world of molecular biology. -
John Venter
J. Craig Venter began the race to sequence the human genome. n the early 1990s, Venter developed the EST method of finding genes, and promoted it as cheaper and faster than the Human Genome Project that was just getting started