Watson And Crick Research Paper
Many people believe that DNA was discovered in 1950 by Watson and Crick, but they are misguided, in fact it was discovered almost centuries before by a number of less known scientists. Genes were discovered to be heritable from parents by a humble pea grower by the name of Gregor Mendel in 1866. Since then we have discovered that DNA, also known as deoxyribonucleic acid, is the carrier of genes, traits that pass down from generation to generation.The reality is that the credit didn’t go to everyone who deserved it. This was because, Watson and Crick only figured out the structure, and their predecessors put together small pieces of the puzzle not the whole thing.
Often people talk of Watson and Crick as if they discovered DNA but this is not …show more content…
The beginnings of DNA discovery began with Gregor Mendel and his pea plants, but he couldn’t take any steps further to explain the heredity that he had discovered. Decades later in 1944, a young man by the name of Oswald Avery found evidence that DNA was the carrier of genes. “Avery, an immunochemist at the Hospital of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, worked for many years with pneumococcus, a bacterium that causes pneumonia”(genome news network.org). He discovered that DNA was responsible for certain traits in the bacteria. Alsa, he was a cautious scientist, hesitant to publish his research and in the end his work didn’t become well known until after he died in 1955. In 1950, a man named Erwin Chargaff discovered that of the 4 base pairs of nucleotides, 2 of them had relations with the 2 others. The quantity of adenine was always equal to the quantity of thymine and thus was also true with the other two bases. After he published his research, those rules became known as Chargaff’s rule. Clever as he was however, he couldn’t put two and two together to realize that DNA was a double helix. His work however, was quite beneficial to Watson and Crick as they toiled away on what would become the first true model of DNA, It gave them intel that the base pairs should look
Often people talk of Watson and Crick as if they discovered DNA but this is not …show more content…
The beginnings of DNA discovery began with Gregor Mendel and his pea plants, but he couldn’t take any steps further to explain the heredity that he had discovered. Decades later in 1944, a young man by the name of Oswald Avery found evidence that DNA was the carrier of genes. “Avery, an immunochemist at the Hospital of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, worked for many years with pneumococcus, a bacterium that causes pneumonia”(genome news network.org). He discovered that DNA was responsible for certain traits in the bacteria. Alsa, he was a cautious scientist, hesitant to publish his research and in the end his work didn’t become well known until after he died in 1955. In 1950, a man named Erwin Chargaff discovered that of the 4 base pairs of nucleotides, 2 of them had relations with the 2 others. The quantity of adenine was always equal to the quantity of thymine and thus was also true with the other two bases. After he published his research, those rules became known as Chargaff’s rule. Clever as he was however, he couldn’t put two and two together to realize that DNA was a double helix. His work however, was quite beneficial to Watson and Crick as they toiled away on what would become the first true model of DNA, It gave them intel that the base pairs should look