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Oswald Avery
Oswald Avery and Maclyn McCarty showed that Fred Griffith’s “transforming principle" was DNA. After several tests Oswald was finally able to conclude that DNA was the transforming principle. -
Erwin Chargaff
Erwin isolated DNA from different organisms and measured the levels of each of the four nitrogenous bases. Discovered that Levene’s tetranucleotide theory was not correct and that not all organisms have the exact same DNA. -
Hershey-Chase
Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase did the Hershey-Chase blender experiment that proved phage DNA, and not protein, was the genetic material. -
Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind produced the X-ray crystallography pictures of BDNA. This later helped Watson and Crick to determine the structure of double-stranded DNA. -
James Watson
James Watson, with the help of Francis Crick, came up with the structure for DNA. By using a variety of other scientists’ research and discoveries they were able to develop the double helix DNA strand. -
Francis Crick
Crick also proposed the Central Dogma and Adaptor Hypothesis. He proposed the question of how did the amino acids interact with the carrier RNA. -
Marshall Nirenberg
Nirenberg shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Har Gobind Khorana and Robert Holley for cracking the genetic code. -
Roger Kornberg
Roger Kornberg figured out the importance of histones to chromatin structure. -
Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, Eric Wieschaus
Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus' labs managed to isolate enough mutants and work out the major events in embryonic Drosophila development. -
John Venter
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. Again, he came up with a quicker and faster method: whole genome shotgun sequencing.
