The discovery of DNA involves multiple key figures over a long timeline:
- DNA was first identified in 1869 by Swiss chemist Friedrich Miescher. He discovered a substance he called "nuclein" inside the nuclei of human white blood cells, which was later named DNA. Miescher's discovery was pioneering but not initially recognized for its importance.
- Later in 1944, American biochemist Oswald Avery and colleagues showed that DNA is the material that carries genetic information, overturning the previous belief that proteins held this role.
- The structural understanding of DNA came in 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick announced the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, based in part on X-ray data from Rosalind Franklin. This discovery fundamentally changed science and medicine and led to a Nobel Prize shared with Maurice Wilkins in 1962.
So while Watson and Crick are most famously credited for discovering DNA's structure, the initial identification was by Friedrich Miescher, and the understanding of its role in genetics and precise structure involved multiple contributors across decades.
