The Discovery Of The DNA And The Structure Of DNA

761 Words2 Pages

For a long time, scientists have been researching about DNA and its structures. DNA is strongly related to genetics and how living things perform. Two very intelligent scientists, James Watson and Francis Crick, have made history in Biochemistry when they discovered the structure of DNA. The central idea of this paper is researching the history of DNA structure discovery and about why it is very important. Discovery of DNA structure is very important because DNA is what makes all living things behave the way they do and studying DNA also means learning why living things act this way. DNA structure is a key part of organism traits, behavior, and development of all living organisms. For some background information, DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic …show more content…

James Watson and Francis Crick were the two main scientists who discovered the double helix, the main structure of DNA. Two other scientists, named Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, also helped and contributed along with James Watson and Francis Crick. However, they weren’t as famous because many people believed that they didn’t play as big of a role in the discovery. These scientists were trying to discover the structure of DNA. Their first discovery was the double helix, and Friedrich Miescher, a swiss chemist, discovered “nuclein” inside nuclei of white blood cells, which its name later changed to nucleic acid and then deoxyribonucleic acid, and abbreviated as DNA. Phoebus Levene, a Russian biochemist, discovered the makeup of nucleotides (phosphate and sugar bases) and all the different parts of both DNA (deoxyribose) and RNA (ribose). James Watson and Francis Crick used this information to determine how all of this DNA was made up and formed. They found that the basic molecule of DNA is called the double helix, and how each of the parts of the double helix were connected (the sugar-phosphate bases acted as the sides of the ladder or the stair rails and the nitrogen bases were the steps) and how they each were arranged. They also discovered about the four nitrogen bases, their shapes, and how you can re-organize them in different orders, but due to their shapes, A and T must be connected to each other and the same goes for G and C. DNA was discovered in the 1800s by various scientists, but James Watson and Francis Crick didn’t determine what the structure of DNA was until 1953. James Watson and Francis Crick met at Cambridge University and met Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins in London, England. The way that Watson and Crick discovered the structure is that they found that the shape of each nitrogen base and used reasoning to determine that G must fasten

More about The Discovery Of The DNA And The Structure Of DNA

Open Document