The Discovery Of DNA: Who Discovered DNA?

[♥ Lily ♥]

The discovery of DNA


X-ray diffraction photograph of DNA

Throughout the 20th century, many scientists have tried to study deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). In the early 1950s two scientists, Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, studied DNA using x-rays.


Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Elsie Franklin was an English female chemist and X-ray crystallographer who made contributions to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA (ribonucleic acid), viruses, coal, and graphite. Although her works on coal and viruses were appreciated in her lifetime, her contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA were largely recognised posthumously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin


Maurice Wilkins

Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins CBE FRS was a New Zealand-born British physicist and molecular biologist, and Nobel laureate whose research contributed to the scientific understanding of phosphorescence, isotope separation, optical microscopy and X-ray diffraction, and to the development of radar. He is best known for his work at King's College London on the structure of DNA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Wilkins

Franklin produced an x-ray photograph that allowed two other researchers, James Watson and Francis Crick to work out the 3D structure of DNA. The structure of DNA was found to be a double helix.


James Watson

James Dewey Watson is an American molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA in 1953 with Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin. Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watson


Francis Crick

Francis Harry Compton Crick OM FRS was a British molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist, most noted for being a co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953 with James Watson, work which was based partly on fundamental studies done by Rosalind Franklin, Raymond Gosling and Maurice Wilkins. Together with Watson and Maurice Wilkins, he was jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Crick


DNA double helix

In 1962 Crick and Watson, along with Wilkins, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery. Rosalind Franklin had died four years earlier and her pivotal contribution wasn't acknowledged until much later.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebit.../dnarev3.shtml

[Mortimer]

thanks for sharing, thats very interesting

[alnortedelsur]

You forgot to mention the Spanish physician and Biochemist Severo Ochoa:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severo_Ochoa

He discovered the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of RNA and DNA, which was decisive in the deciphering of the DNA code.