DNA MOLECULE HISTORICAL TIMELINE

Frederick
Griffith
Frederick Griffith (1879-1941) was a British bacteriologist whose focus was
the epidemiology and pathology of bacterial pneumonia. In January 1928
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.He 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. America's leading pneumococcal researcher, Oswald T. Avery,
speculated that Griffith had failed to apply adequate controls. A cautious
and thorough researcher, and a reticent individual, Griffith's tendency
was to publish only findings that he believed truly significant, and
Griffith's findings were rapidly confirmed by researchers in Avery's
laboratory. His discovery was one of the first to show the central role of
DNA in heredity.
 Oswald
Oswald Theodore Avery Jr.Theodore Avery
FRS (October 21, 1877 February 20, 1955)

was a Canadian-born American physician and medical researcher. The

major part of his career was spent at the Rockefeller University
Hospital in New York City. Avery was one of the first molecular
biologists and a pioneer in immunochemistry, but he is best known
for the experiment (published in 1944 with his co-workers Colin
MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty) that isolated DNA as the material of
which genes and chromosomes are made.

The Nobel laureate Arne Tiselius said that Avery was the most deserving
scientist to not receive the Nobel Prize for his work, though he was
nominated for the award throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.
The lunar crater Avery was named in his honor.
 Alfred Day
Hershey
Alfred Day Hershey was born on December 4th, 1908, in Owosso, Michigan.
He studied at the Michigan State College, where he obtained B.S. in 1930,
and Ph.D. in 1934. In 1967 he got an honorary D.Sc. at the University of
Chicago.
From 1934 till 1950 he was engaged in teaching and research, at the
Department of Bacteriology, Washington University School of
Medicine. In 1950 he became a Staff Member, at the Department of
Genetics, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Cold Spring Harbor, New
York; in 1962 he was appointed Director of the Genetics Research Unit of
the same institution.
Alfred Hershey married Harriet Davidson in 1945, they have one son,
Peter.
Alfred Hershey is a Member of the American Society for Microbiology,
the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences. Hershey is Recipient of the Kimber Genetics Award of the
National Academy of Sciences, 1965. Michigan State University honored
him with an M.D.h.c. in 1970.
 Martha Cowles
30, 1927 August 8, 2003), also known as Martha C.
Chase
Martha Cowles Chase (November
Epstein, was an American geneticistknown for having in 1952, with Alfred Hershey,
experimentally helped to confirm that DNA rather than protein is the genetic
material of life. She was greatly respected as a geneticist.In 1952 Chase was a young
laboratory assistant to American bacteriophage expert Alfred Hershey at Cold
Spring Harbor Laboratoryfrom the Carnegie Institution of Washington. This was
where the well-known HersheyChase experiment was performed. The experiment
helped to confirm that it was DNA, and not protein, that was the genetic material
through which traits were inherited. This result was contrary to prevailing scientific
opinion at the time.
In 1953 Chase moved to a post at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee,
and she later also worked at the University of Rochester. During the 1950s she
returned to Cold Spring Harbor to take part in meetings of the Phage Group of
biologists.
She met and married fellow scientist Richard Epstein in California in the late 1950s.
The marriage was brief and they divorced shortly after. A series of personal
setbacks through the 1960s ended Chase's career in science She spent decades
suffering from a form of dementia that robbed her of short-term memory. She died
of pneumonia on August 8, 2003, at the age of 75.
The HERSHEYCHASE experiments were a series
of experiments conducted in 1952 by Alfred Hershey and Martha
Chase that helped to confirm that DNA is genetic material. While DNA
had been known to biologists since 1869, many scientists still assumed at
the time that proteins carried the information for inheritance because
DNA appeared simpler than proteins. In their experiments, 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.

Hershey shared the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Max
Delbrck and Salvador Luria for their discoveries concerning the
genetic structure of viruses.
 Erwin
Chargaff
Erwin Chargaff (11 August 1905 20 June 2002) was an Austro-
Hungarian biochemist who immigrated to the United States during the Nazi era
and was a professor of biochemistry at Columbia University medical school.
Through careful experimentation, Chargaff discovered two rules that helped lead to
the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.

The first rule was that in DNA the number of guanine units equals the number of
cytosine units, and the number of adenine units equals the number of thymine
units. This hinted at the base pair makeup of DNA.

The second rule was that the relative amounts of guanine, cytosine, adenine and
thymine bases varies from one species to another. This hinted that DNA rather than
protein could be the genetic material.
 Rosalind
Born in 1920 in London, England, Rosalind Franklin earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from
Franklin
Cambridge University. She learned crystallography and X-ray diffraction, techniques that she
applied to DNA fibers. One of her photographs provided key insights into DNA structure. Other
scientists used it as evidence to support their DNA model and took credit for the discovery.
Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958, at age 37.
British chemist Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born into an affluent and influential Jewish family
on July 25, 1920, in Notting Hill, London, England. She displayed exceptional intelligence from
early childhood, knowing from the age of 15 that she wanted to be a scientist. She received her
education at several schools, including North London Collegiate School, where she excelled in
science, among other things.
Rosalind Franklin enrolled at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1938 and studied chemistry. In
1941, she was awarded Second Class Honors in her finals, which, at that time, was accepted as a
bachelor's degree in the qualifications for employment. She went on to work as an assistant
research officer at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association, where she studied the
porosity of coalwork that was the basis of her 1945 Ph.D. thesis "The physical chemistry of
solid organic colloids with special reference to coal."
In the fall of 1946, Franklin was appointed at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de
l'Etat in Paris, where she worked with crystallographer Jacques Mering. He taught her X-ray
diffraction, which would play an important role in her research that led to the discovery of "the
secret of life"the structure of DNA. In addition, Franklin pioneered the use of X-rays to create
images of crystalized solids in analyzing complex, unorganized matter, not just single crystals.

Francis Crick
 Biophysicist Francis Crick was born in Northampton, England, in 1916. He helped develop radar and magnetic
mines during World War II. After the war, he began researching the structure of DNA for the University of
Cambridge Medical Research Council at its Cavendish Laboratory with James D. Watson. He shared the Nobel
Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for his work and continued conducting research until his death in 2004.
Francis Harry Compton Crick was born on June 8, 1916, in Northampton, England, and was educated at
Northampton Grammar School and Mill Hill School in London. He attended University College London, where he
studied physics, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1937. He soon began conducting research toward a
Ph.D., but, in 1939, his path was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. During the war, he was involved in
military research, working on the development of magnetic and acoustic mines. After the war, Dr. R.V. Jones, the
head of Britain's wartime scientific intelligence wanted Crick to continue his work, but Crick decided to continue his
studies, this time in biology, of which he knew very little at this point.
Supported chiefly by a scholarship from the Medical Research Council, Francis Crick went to Cambridge and
worked at the Strangeways Research Laboratory before moving on to Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in 1949.
An young American biologist named James Watson began his research at the lab in 1951, and he and Crick formed a
collaborative working relationship unraveling the mysteries of the structure of DNA. Crick earned his Ph.D. from
the University of Cambridge's Gonville and Caius College in 1954.
 James Watson
Born on April 6, 1928, in Chicago, Illinois, James D. Watson is credited with the
discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA along with Francis Crick. Watson
received a 1962 Nobel Prize and went on to do work in cancer research and
mapping the human genome. He later came under fire for several controversial
remarks on subjects ranging from obesity to race-based intelligence.

James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago, Illinois, on April 6, 1928, and spent
his childhood there, attending Horace Mann Grammar School and South Shore
High School before earning a scholarship to the University of Chicago and
enrolling at age 15. In 1947, he received a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology
and then went on to attend Indiana University in Bloomington, where he received
his Ph.D. in zoology in 1950. During his graduate studies, Watson was influenced
by the work of geneticists H. J. Muller and T. M. Sonneborn and microbiologist S.
E. Luria. His Ph.D. thesis was a study of the effect of hard X-rays on bacteriophage
multiplication, and he became interested in the work of scientists working at the
University of Cambridge with photographic patterns made by X-rays.