Here, you will find information on the life and works of several notable geneticists, biologists, and biochemists.
Charles Darwin
Darwin is considered to be one of the fathers of genetics. Born on 12 February 1809 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire (England), Darwin was born into an upperclass family. Darwin initially planned to go into the medical field when he studied at Edinburgh University, but later switched to divinity at Cambridge. In 1831, he joined a five year scientific expedition on the ship HMS Beagle. The breakthrough in his theologies came when the ship reached the Galapagos Islands, 500 miles west of South America. He noticed that each island contained its own variety of finches. These birds were closely related but different in important ways. Influenced by the ideas of Malthus, Darwin proposed his famous theory of evolution by the process of natural selection.
Darwin worked on his theory for 20 years. After learning that another naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, had developed similar ideas, the two made a joint announcement of their discovery in 1858. In 1859 Darwin published 'On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection'. Charles Darwin died on 19 April 1882 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. |
|
Gregor MendelA Moravian man originally named Johann at birth, Mendel was born in 1822 in Hyncice, Czechoslovakia on July 22nd. He was admitted in an Institute of Philosophy in Olmutz. Due to financial reasons however, he terminated his studies and went back to the monastery in Brunn in 1843.
Mendel thought that monastery was the best place for him to study about finances. He was put in charge of the garden at the monastery and named himself Gregor. He became a priest in 1847. After four years he went to University of Vienna where he studied physics, chemistry, botany and physics. When he returned to the monastery after completing his studies, he took a position as a teacher of natural sciences at the Technical School at Brno. Around 1854, Mendel began to research the hereditary traits in plant hybrids. At the time, it was a generally accepted fact that the hereditary traits of any offspring were merely the diluted blending of whatever were present in the parent generation. Mendel’s research continued over as many as eight years (between 1856 and 1863), and involved tens of thousands of individual plants. Gregor Mendel died on January 6, 1884, at the age of 62. He was laid to rest in the monastery’s burial plot. Sadly, it was not until decades later, when Mendel’s research advanced the work of several geneticists, botanists, and biologists, that its significance was more fully appreciated. Learn more about Mendel's work with a video here. |
Frederich Miescher Miescher was born in 1844 into a scientific family in Basel, Switzerland. He studied medicine in the cities of Basel and Göttingen. He graduated in 1868 and decided to pursue physiological chemistry due to a hearing impairment caused by a severe attack of typhoid fever. He studied organic chemistry in Felix Hoppe-Seyler's laboratory in Tübingen and also physiology in the laboratory of Carl Ludwig.
At the Hoppe-Seyler lab, Miescher was given the task of researching the composition of lymphoid cells (white blood cells). These cells were found in great quantities in the pus from infections. Miescher collected bandages from a nearby clinic and washed off the pus. He eventually isolated a new molecule, one that he called "nuclein", from the cell nucleus. He found that nuclein was composed of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorus. He was able to isolate nuclein from other cells and later used salmon sperm (as opposed to pus) as a source. Although Miescher did most of his work in 1869, his paper on nuclein wasn't actually published until 1871. Before its publication, Hoppe-Seyler wanted to confirm the accuracies of Miescher's findings before letting him publish the paper. For the rest of his career, Miescher continued to experiment and examine nuclein for pretty much the rest of his career. Miescher was appointed the professor of physiology at the University of Basel in 1872. Although he put in a lot of time and effort, Miescher was not a good teacher. He was said to be too shy and his preoccupation with his research made it hard for him to connect with his students. He was said to be somewhat of a perfectionist and a workaholic, and often worked very long hours towards his research. Miescher founded Switzerland's first physiological institute at the Vesalianum in 1885. He retired in 1895 and died the same year of tuberculosis in Davos. We encourage you to visit the website of the Frederich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research for exploration. |
|
It is often confused that Watson and Crick are the discoverers of DNA. Watson and Crick were not the discoverers of DNA, but rather the first scientists to formulate an accurate description of this molecule's complex, double-helical structure. Moreover, Watson and Crick's work was directly dependent on the research of numerous scientists before them, such as Friedrich Miescher and Erwin Chargaff.
Francis Harry Compton Crick was born on 8 June 1916 near Northampton. He studied physics at University College, London, but changed from physics to biology and in 1947 began to work at Cambridge University. By 1949 he was working at the Medical Research Council unit at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. James Dewey Watson was born on 6 April 1928 in Chicago and studied at the universities of Chicago, Indiana and Copenhagen. He then moved to Cambridge University. Watson and Crick worked together on studying the structure of DNA in 1951. At that time Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, both working at King's College, London, were using X-ray diffraction to study DNA. Crick and Watson used their findings in their own research. In April 1953, they published the news of their discovery, a molecular structure of DNA based on all its known features - the double helix. Their model served to explain how DNA replicates and how hereditary information is coded on it. This set the stage for the rapid advances in molecular biology that continue to this day. Watson, Crick and Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962. Franklin had died in 1958 and, despite her key experimental work, the prize could not be received posthumously. Crick and Watson both received numerous other awards and prizes for their work. Francis Crick continued to work in genetics and then moved into brain research, becoming a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California. He died on 28 July 2004. From 1988 to 1992, James Watson directed the Human Genome Project at the American National Institutes of Health. He was instrumental in obtaining funding for the project and in encouraging cooperation between governments and leading scientists. |
Thomas H. MorganThomas Hunt Morgan was born on September 25, 1866, at Lexington, Kentucky, U.S.A. He was the eldest son of Charlton Hunt Morgan. Attended the University of Kentucky, where he loaded up on natural science courses. After graduating from U of K in 1886, Morgan attended Johns Hopkins University to do
graduate work in zoology. From 1891-1904,
Morgan was a professor at Bryn Mawr College where he taught biology and other
natural science subjects. He continued his own research, and published books
and papers on embryology and zoology.
In 1904, he was asked by his good friend, Edmund Wilson, to join the staff at Columbia University as Professor of Experimental Zoology. Morgan accepted, and so began the Drosophila (fruit fly) chapter of Morgan's life. Morgan had become interested in species variation, and in 1911, he established the "Fly Room" at Columbia to determine how a species changed over time. For the next 17 years, in the small, cramped room, Morgan and his students did ground-breaking genetic research using Drosophila melanogaster, fruit flies. Though initially against the idea that the behavior of chromosomes can explain inheritance, Morgan became the leading supporter of the idea. Morgan and his students, developed the ideas, and provided the proof for the chromosomal theory of heredity, genetic linkage, chromosomal crossing over and non-disjunction. Morgan was an energetic, congenial man with a sense of humor and a flair for practical jokes. In the lab, Morgan was the ideas man and the planner. He frequently left the details of planning the experiments to his students. Morgan did do his share of work in the lab though he was resistant to the "new" equipment and methods that Calvin Bridges introduced, such as the binocular microscope. Morgan's data, often scribbled on the back of old envelopes or scraps of paper, were decorated with fly corpses. Morgan squashed "unwanted" flies rather than dumping them into the etherized morgue that Bridges set up. In 1928, Morgan moved to Pasadena to organize the biology division at the California Institute of Technology. He became less involved with Drosophila work and returned to his earlier interests in embryology. In 1933, Thomas Hunt Morgan received the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his work in establishing the chromosomal theory of inheritance. He shared the prize money with his children, and those of his long-time colleagues, Alfred Sturtevant and Calvin Bridges. Although Morgan officially retired from his position at Cal Tech in 1941, he continued to work in the lab until his death in 1945. |
Erin ChargaffChargaff was born on August 11th, 1905 in Chernivtsi, a provincial capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
At the outbreak of World War I, his family moved to Vienna, where he attended the Maximiliansgymnasium (now the Gymnasium Wasagasse). He then went on to the Vienna University of Technology to receive a doctorate in chemistry in 1928. After graduation he completed a fellowship at Yale before returning to Europe, where he became an assistant at the University of Berlin in 1930. Chargaff was, however, Jewish, and was persecuted when Hitler came to power in 1933 and excluded Jews from academic positions. As a result, he left Germany for France. After a brief stint at the Pasteur Institute, he went back to the United States, and in 1935 started his lifelong career at Columbia University. He became a U.S. citizen in 1940. While Chargaff was growing up, his family had been fairly well off, but the Great Inflation after World War I brought financial ruin, and his father, the owner of a small bank, lost his business. His mother survived her husband, who passed away in 1934, but she became a victim of the Holocaust. Chargaff's lab focused solely on DNA. At the time, it was believed that DNA was made up of four bases (adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine) that were present in regular amounts, but that their organization was too simple to carry hereditary information. It was Chargaff's work that overturned this. In 1944 Chargaff began his investigations into the composition of DNA. By 1950 he had experimentally determined certain crucial facts that led directly to the correct elucidation of its molecular structure. By looking at the composition of DNA from various organisms i.e. plants, people and fish, Chargaff noticed that in any given species the ratio of adenine to thymine was roughly equal, and the ratio of cytosine and guanine was also roughly equal. For example in human DNA the ratios are; A=30.9%, T=29.4%, G=19.9% and C=19.8%. This rule is the same for every living thing. He had managed to show that the chemical bases exhibited a complementary relationship. Even though Chargaff made this discovery and published the research in 1950, the significance of these base-pairs (he did not use that phrase) eluded him. It wasn't until Crick and Watson's paper on the structure of DNA three years later that it was fully understood. They even cited Chargaff's work in their paper. |
Scientists & Discoveries Timeline
Timeline Information courtesy of www.accessexcellence.org