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Period: to
1900's Scientists
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Phoebus Levene
He characterized the different forms of nucleic acid, DNA from RNA, and found that DNA contained adenine, guanine, thymine, cytosine, deoxyribose, and a phosphate group. Not only did Levene identify the components of DNA, he also showed that the components were linked together in the order phosphate-sugar-base to form units. -
Linus Pauling
Pauling was one of the founders of the fields of quantum chemistry and molecular biology. He launched his faculty career with a very productive five years, continuing with his X-ray crystal studies and also performing quantum mechanical calculations on atoms and molecules. -
Frederick Griffith
Frederick showed that Streptococcus pneumoniae, implicated in many cases of lobar pneumonia, could transform from one strain into a different strain. The observation was attributed to an unidentified transforming principle or transforming factor. This was later identified as DNA -
Avery Oswald
Oswald Avery worked on many strains of bacteria and applied different immunological and chemical methods. He published a clinical study of the tuberculosis bacterium. -
Rosalind Franklin
Franklin worked for the CURA til 1947 and published papers on the physical structure of coal. In 1951 she was offered a scholarship to King's College in London. There she worked improve the X-ray crystallography. -
Erwin Chargaff
Chargaff discovered two rules that helped lead to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. The first and best known achievement was to show that in natural DNA the number of guanine units equals the number of cytosine units and the number of adenine units equals the number of thymine units. -
James Watson
James Watson awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material. -
Francis Crick
Besides coming up with the double helix structure for DNA with James Watson, Crick also proposed the Central Dogma and Adaptor Hypothesis. He used available X-ray data and model building, the two solved the structure of DNA. -
Maurice Wilkins
Maurice Wilkins' research contributed to the scientific understanding of phosphorescence, isotope separation, optical microscopy and X-ray diffraction, and to the development of radar. He is best known for his work at King's College London on the structure of DNA. In recognition of this work, he, Francis Crick and James Watson were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. -
Hershey and Chase
Hershey and Chase showed that when bacteriophages, which are composed of DNA and protein, infect bacteria, their DNA enters the host bacterial cell, but most of their protein does not. Although the results were not conclusive, and Hershey and Chase were cautious in their interpretation, previous, contemporaneous and subsequent discoveries all served to prove that DNA is the hereditary material.Knowledge of DNA gained from these discoveries has applications in forensics.
