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Miescher
he was the first to recognize dna as a molecule. he had a hearing problem so he chose a good career that didn’t require good hearing so he chose medical research and his research lab focused a lot on tissue chemistry. This started the first ideas of dna research, he discovered the molecule and showed people what dna was, he basically discovered it. . -
Chargaff
the number of A residues always equals the number of T residues;
the number of G residues always equals the number of C residues;
the number of purines always equals the number of pyrimidines, in 1944 he became aware of research being done by others and changed his experimental focus to dna, where he spent years working until he made his discoveries. This helped us understand the nucleotide bases that make up DNA and how the percentages of them will always very closely equal each other. -
Franklin
she got x-ray images of dna and phosphates located on the exterior, she was set up to improve the x-ray at her college and used it to get good images of dna. This was good for dna because it allowed other scientist after her to be able to use her photos and make assumptions from them. This allowed us to truly understand the outside of DNA and what makes it up. -
Hershey & Chase
found that dna was associated with genetic material not protein. They found this out by injecting chemical tracers in a virus, T2, and tracked their reproduction and found that the tracers resembled dna more than proteins. This helped us see dna’s real purpose, at this time people knew what dna was but not what it was for. -
Watson and Crick
these 2 scientists discovered that DNA’s structure is in the shape of a double helix or twisted ladder, they started working on it because of Linus Pauling’s failure to do the same. This was helpful to our understanding of DNA because now we know the structure of DNA and we can grasp an understanding of what we are actually looking at. -
Meselson & Stahl
demonstrated the process of dna replication, they tested the idea of dna replication by growing bacteria in a test tube. This helped us understand how bacteria and other organisms are able to reproduce offspring.