The Race to Understanding and Manipulating DNA :: Exploratory Essays Research Papers

Early 1953. Three labs, two in England and one in California, raced to discover the structure of deoxyribose nucleic acid. At Cal Tech in Pasadena, California, Linus Pauling had recently discovered the alpha-helix. Now he was turning his attention to DNA. At King's College in the University of London, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, although hampered by their inability to get along with one another, had taken actual pictures of DNA using x-rays and were hot on the trail. The most unlikely pair in the race, a 24-year-old American biologist and a 36-year-old English physicist, were also close to identifying the elusive molecule, although they were forbidden from directly working on it. And so the race intensified for the secret of life itself. Get Ready, Get Set... Mendel and Pea Plants The events leading up to this race actually began with an Austrian monk named Johann Gregor Mendel. Although in reality Mendel wanted to be a high school teacher, he failed the mandatory examination three times and decided to become a monk to pursue his studies in the peace of a monastery (Asimov, Genes 11). Interested in the inheritance of characteristics, he began working with pea plants in 1857. He crossed true-bred plants and then their offspring and recorded the results. From these results he established general rules or laws for inheritance. He worked for eight years and with over ten thousand different plants (Arnold 20). Looking for a sponsor for his work, Mendel sent his paper to noted botanist Wilhelm von Nageli. Nageli sent it back after barely glancing at it (Nageli died in 1891 and would be remembered, not for his own vast scientific work, but for his failure to pay attention to Mendel) (Asimov, Genes 19-20). Mendel finally did publish his results in the magazine of the National History Society of Brunn in 1866 (Arnold 7). Other botanists paid little or no attention to his work, and his ideas about inheritance became lost for thirty-four years. Mendel became the abbot of his monastery in 1868 and was too busy and discouraged to continue his experiments. He died in 1884, never knowing that he would be touted as the "father of modern genetics." The Early Work on DNA In 1869, just after Mendel had quit working with plants, a 25-year-old Swiss chemist, Johann Friedrich Miescher, discovered a substance called nuclein inside cells. This substance was later found to be attached to a protein which was named "histone" from the Greek word meaning "cell.