Abstract DNA has a very colorful history, from how it was found all the to how the names of the bases came to be. You will find out how the true origin of the shape of DNA was found. You can see how the discovery of DNA started. You can also learn how the uses of DNA were first started. You may even learn something that you didn’t even know about DNA until now. Get ready to find out the history of DNA.
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DNA was a huge mystery to scientists for decades. Nobody knew what it looked like, or even what it actually was. DNA was first found by a scientist named Friedrich Miescher, but was called nucleic acid by Friedrich’s pupil, Richard Altmann, during 1889. Then, in 1929, Phoebus Levene identified the components that make up DNA, which are
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Also, cabbages and humans have 40-50% identical DNA! (Baidya, 2014)
Back to the subject, the first woman to actually find out what shape DNA had was named Rosalind Franklin. She took an x-ray of a strand of DNA to find out what it would look like. She got the picture, but died before the rest of the world knew her accomplishment. Then in 1953, two scientists named James Watson and Francis Crick thought they could be sneaky and used Rosalind’s work and gave her no credit when they supposedly found the shape of DNA to be a double helix. I’m pretty sure Rosalind was rolling in her grave when Watson and Crick got that Nobel Prize instead of her for her own work.
Finally, the process of DNA being used to identify a person and if that person was at a certain place was started by a guy named Alec Jeffreys. He discovered the process of DNA profiling in 1984, and the process was used for the first time to convict Colin Pitchfork in the Enderby murders case in Leicester, England in 1988 (Mandel, 2012). We now use the same process to identify if a person was at a crime scene, find out somebody’s mother or father, or even to find a person’s whole family tree. We have come up with many different ways to use DNA today, but none of it would have been possible had it not been for those curious scientists that kept studying DNA until they found the chink in its armor and uncovered DNA’s secrets. I just want to thank all of the scientists and other people that made us knowing DNA possible. Thank