20 Things You Didn’t Know About... DNA

IDing crooks from DNA in their fingerprints, the 8 percent of our genome that came from viruses and the plant that laughs at our genetic endowment

By Kirsten Weir
Jun 13, 2011 12:00 AMOct 9, 2019 4:24 PM
dna1
onathon Rosen

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 Sorry, Jimmy: James Watsonand Francis Crick did not discover DNA. That honor goes to Swiss biochemist Friedrich Miescher, who in 1869 found the molecule in the nuclei of white blood cells and called it nuclein.

 Nor did they figure out that DNA is our genetic blueprint; bacteriologist Oswald Averyand his colleagues did that in the early 1940s.

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