There is a lot of confusion as to who actually discovered DNA. Though many give credit to James Watson and Francis Crick for discovering DNA in the 1950s, the actual discovery occurred decades before that.
Watson and Crick came to their monumental conclusion about the structure of DNA in 1953 by building up on the work of pioneers before them.
The molecule now known as DNA was first identified in the 1860s by the Swiss chemist, Johann Friedrich Miescher who called it ‘nuclein’.
Although the significance of this discovery was not initially recognised, it set further research and discoveries in motion. In the 1880s, Albrecht Kossel isolated the five organic compounds that are present in nucleic acid: adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine and uracil. The role of DNA in heredity was confirmed in 1952, when Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase showed through experiments that DNA is genetic material.
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