Here is the History of DNA which has been the single biggest breakthrough of our time with respect to supporting Evolution as well as new medical breakthroughs.
1856-1863 Gregor Johann Mendel and Austrian Monk grew peas and did experiments with them. And he came up with what was we now call Mendelian inheritance: its inheritance of biological features that follows the laws proposed by Gregor Johann Mendel in 1865 and 1866 and re-discovered in 1900. It was initially very controversial. We still use Mendelian Genetics today see Punnett Square.
At this time DNA was an unknown and Mendel had no idea what was going on. He did understand that there was a discrete unit in each parent that was being passed to the progeny. He was fortunate that the peas he worked with in his garden subscribed to Mendelian Genetics. Poor Mendel was ignored even after he published his work. We now know that most inheritance is non Mendelian.
1900: Mendelian Genetics was rediscovered by 3 genetics who thought their work was original until they did what would be the equivalent of today as a literature search and voila they found Mendel’s work.
1859: Darwin published The Origin of Species. Darwin never heard of Mendel’s work nor did he even know what DNA was.
1869: DNA was discovered but no one knew what it was, thus they paid no attention to it!
1912: Beginnings of X-ray crystallography which became a major method of elucidating the structure of macro molecules.
1915: Thomas Hunt Morgan and his colleagues identified the chromosome as the structure in the cell that is responsible for the transmission of heredity information. His major work was called:
The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity. Chromosomes have a lot of protein in them besides DNA. So at this time since proteins were understood whereas DNA was not…it was believed it was the other proteins in the chromosome that were responsible for inheritance.
1944: A superb experiment was done…in fact one of the best you will ever read about. Avery, MacLeod and McCarty proved that it was the DNA part of the chromosomes that transmitted inheritance not the other proteins. In brief what they did was take the chromosomes and subjected them to proteases that chopped up the proteins and found that the chromosomes still maintained the ability to transmit inheritance.
Then they subjected the DNA to DNace’s which chops up the DNA, and discovered the transmission of inheritance was lost.
This proved that it was the DNA part of the chromosomes that is responsible for heredity.
1953: Crick, Watson, Franklin, Wilkins – Crick and Watson deciphered the DNA structure BUT they were only able to do so because Franklin and Wilkins used X-ray crystallography and got detailed graphs of DNA, which they used in conjunction with some other data to elucidate the structure of DNA. When the Noble Prize was awarded for this Franklin had passed away from ovarian cancer, thus Watson, Crick and Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize.
2003: 50 years later the Human Genome was sequenced. This has absolutely determined medicine in our era. You can bet 100 years from now or even 500 years from now when humans look back on this time, they will look back on those 50 years in the same way that we look back on the 50 years following the Voyage of Columbus. It will certainly be that much of a game changer.
It's fascinating how much our knowledge has evolved since Mendel and Darwin's era.
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What's tragic about scientific discovery?