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Gregor Mendel
Mendel worked with pea plants. He cross fertilized pea plants to see what characteristics would be produced. Then he let the next generation self-polinate to see what would happen. Mendel discovered the principle of segregation and the principle of independent assortment. -
William Bateson and Reginald Punnett
These men worked with two characteristics in sweet peas, flower color and pollen shape. They crossed these dihybrid plants and discovered linked genes. They also created Punnett squares. -
Thomas Hunt Morgan
In Morgan's experiments he would cross fruit flys to see what characteristics would be produced. From his experiments he discovered the effects of crossing over and recombination frequency. -
Archibald Garrod
Garrod worked with a hereditary condition called alkaptonuria. This is when your urine is dark red. This occurs becuase your enzymes can't break down the urine. This lead to him discovering the relationship between genes and proteins. -
Frederick Griffith
Griffith combined different baterias and injected them into mice and observed if they survived or not. From this experiment he discovered transformation. -
George Beadle and Edward Tatum
Together these men worked with orange bread mold. While working with bread mold they dicovered the relationship between genes and enzymes. They also discovered the function of a gene is to dictate the production of a specific enzyme. -
Erwin Chargaff
Chargaff studied adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine using models of DNA. Through his experiments he learned that the amount of adenine in DNA was equal to thymine and the amount of guanine was equal to that of cytosine. -
Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase
Hershey and Chase used bacteriphage composed of only DNA and Proteins. The DNA was taggged by radioactive phosporus and the protein was tagged with radioactive sulfur. They did this so they could trace where they went. From this experiment they determined that DNA was the genetic material. -
Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin
Together Wilkins and Franklin took X-rays of DNA. From these photographs they helped discover the actual shape of DNA. -
James Watson and Francis Crick
Watson and Crick used pictures and models to figure out the shape of DNA. They found out that DNA was a double helix and it had specific base pairing. -
Marshall Nirenberg
Nirenberg synthesized an artificial RNA molecule by linking together identical RNA nucleotides having uracil as their base. From this experiment he discovered genetic codes.
