-
Period: to
Scientists' Accomplishments
-
Frederick Griffith
He reported what is now known as Griffith's Experiment, the first widely accepted demonstrations of bacterial transformation, whereby a bacterium distinctly changes its form and function. -
Oswald Avery, McCarty, and Macleod
Avery, MacLeod and McCarty used strands of purified DNA precipitated from solutions of cell components, to perform bacterial transformations -
Watson and Crick
James Watson and Francis Crick's classic paper that first describes the double helical structure of DNA. With some understatement they note that the structure “suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material”. -
Max Delbrück
While every other biological scientist was happy to see that phages fit into the general genetic framework Max was disappointed that his dream of finding a definite complementarity in biology did not come true. Finally, in 1953 the double-helical structure of DNA was discovered and Max gave up research in genetics altogether. -
Beadle and Tatum
SourceThe Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1958 was divided, one half jointly to George Wells Beadle and Edward Lawrie Tatum "for their discovery that genes act by regulating definite chemical events" and the other half to Joshua Lederberg "for his discoveries concerning genetic recombination and the organization of the genetic material of bacteria". -
Arthur Kornberg
An American biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 for his discovery of "the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)" together with Dr. Severo Ochoa of New York University. He was also awarded the Paul-Lewis Award in Enzyme Chemistry from the American Chemical Society in 1951, L.H.D. degree from Yeshiva University in 1962, as well as National Medal of Science in 1979. -
Maurice Wilkins
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1962 was awarded jointly to Francis Harry Compton Crick, James Dewey Watson and Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material". -
Marshall Nirenberg
An American biochemist and geneticist. He shared a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 with Har Gobind Khorana and Robert W. Holley for "breaking the genetic code" and describing how it operates in protein synthesis. In the same year, together with Har Gobind Khorana, he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University. -
Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer
November 1972 found both Boyer and Cohen in Hawaii giving papers at a U.S.-Japan joint meeting on plasmids. A plasmid is DNA, found especially in bacteria, that is physically separate from, and can replicate independently of, the bacterium’s chromosomal DNA. -
Paul Berg
SourceThe Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1980 was divided, one half awarded to Paul Berg "for his fundamental studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids, with particular regard to recombinant-DNA"
