Famous Geneticist

1. Gregor Mendel- is an Austrian monk and his love of garden peas

created a seismic shift in biological thinking when he came up with the
laws of inheritance.

2. Francis Crick and James Watson joint

entrants for their landmark 1953 paper on the
structure of DNA. They cracked the secret of life
when they worked out the double helix
structure. They were awarded the Nobel Prize
for Physiology or Medicine in 1962.

3. Erwin Chargaff - his work laid the foundations for Crick and
Watson's discoveries. By studying various organisms he observed that the
ratio of the nucleic acid bases adenine to thymine was roughly equal, and
that the ratio of cytosine to guanine was also roughly equal.
 4. Oswald Avery - certainly an unsung hero in the history of genetics - it was
his work in 1944 that concluded that DNA (the so-called "transforming
principle") transmitted the hereditary information.

5. Alec Jeffreys - was the scientist who invented DNA

fingerprinting; a technology that has many applications such as
solving crimes, paternity testing, and resolving immigration
disputes. It was first used in the courtroom in 1986.

6. Rosalind Franklin sometimes referred to as the dark lady of DNA.

Her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA was vital to helping
Crick and Watson come up with their hypothesis on the structure of
DNA. Her contribution went largely unrecognized during her lifetime,
and she was not awarded the Nobel Prize that Crick and Watson shared
with Maurice Wilkins because she had died in 1958. The award is not
given posthumously.

7. Herb Boyer - co-founder of the biotech giant Genentech Inc, and a

pioneer in the field of recombinant DNA technology. He and Stanley
Norman Cohen created the world's first genetically engineered organism.
8. Friederick Miescher - the man who discovered DNA. He discovered it in
1869 whilst studying white blood cells from pus-soaked bandages. He called
the genetic material 'nuclein' because it had come from the nucleus. He did
not know that it was the hereditary material.

9. Ian Wilmut - lead researcher of the team that gave the world Dolly the
Sheep.

12. James Dewey Watson- is an American molecular biologist, geneticist

and zoologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of
DNA in 1953 with Francis Crick. Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were
awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their
discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its
significance for information transfer in living material"