Lesson 2: The History of DNA Presentation Transcript

Hello and welcome to Mrs. Crook’s 9th Grade Biology Class. This is DNA: Lesson 2 The
History of DNA. Please watch this presentation and complete your Double Entry notes as you
proceed. You will be writing the name of the person on left and what they did on the right

We will be covering six people who contributed to the discovery of the DNA structure as well as
other components that describe the compositions of DNA. We will be discussing, in no particular
order, Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, Francis Crick, Erwin Chargaff, Linus Pauling, and
Maurice Wilkins.

Rosalind Franklin was researching and working at King's College London, which is in London,
during the 1950’s. Franklin was trying to determine the structure of DNA through X-ray
diffraction. X-ray diffraction is basically when you shoot x-rays at an object and the atoms of
that object will reflect this x-ray light and show an image or a shadow. X-ray diffraction is much
more complicated than that, but this is the way I remembered it. Anyways the images of DNA
where significant because they showed the structure of DNA. Specifically, Photo 51, depicted
that the DNA was in the shape of an “X”. This led to the discovery of the double helix structure.

Francis Crick was a British biologist who worked at Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge and
understood X-ray diffraction. Crick was friends with a man named Maurice Wilkins, who
introduced him to James Watson

James Watson is an American who had been researching the structure of DNA along with many
of aspects of molecular biology including cancer. Watson attended a lecture given by Maurice
Wilkins and saw Photo 51. He instantly saw the structure of DNA as a twist and worked with
Crick on the structure of DNA and came up with many models, but nothing ever seemed quite
right. They tried and failed and tried and failed, then finally made the double helix!

Erwin Chargaff was born in Chernivtsi. Chargadd started researching the composition of DNA in
the 1940’s and came up with three rules.
1. the number of adenine (A) always equals the number of thymine (T)
2. the number of guanine (G) always equals the number of cytosine (C)
3. the number of purines (A+G) always equals the number of pyrimidines (T+C)
So, this helped with the understanding of how the complementary base pairs work and structure
DNA

Linus Pauling was an American quantum chemist and molecular biologist. Pauling
research and used X-ray crystallography, which is a technique used to determine the atomic and
molecular structure. X-ray crystallography helped to show how part of the DNA was structured.
Pauling’s theory was that the DNA structure was more complex, and he proposed a triple helix
theory.
Maurice Wilkins was doing research at King’s College, London with Franklin. Wilkins
showed an X-ray image of DNA that was taken by Raymond Gosling, who worked for Rosalind
Franklin. The image, Photo 51, showed that DNA undoubtedly had a regular, symmetrical “X”
structure. But Wilkins, Gosling, and Franklin couldn’t interpret it.
I will tell you that Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in
1962 for their discovery that DNA is in the shape of a double helix. But who really discovered
the structure of DNA? One person? A couple of the individuals? All of them? Think about this
idea of who discovered the structure of DNA because we will be discussing it further tomorrow.