DNA: The Making

Lyle Sykes

For more than 50 years after the science of genetics was established and the patterns of inheritance through genes were clarified, the largest questions remained unanswered: How are the chromosomes and their genes copied so exactly from cell to cell, and how do they direct the structure and behavior of living things? This paper will discuss those questions and the people that answered them.
Two American geneticists, George Wells Beadle and Edward Lawrie Tatum, provided one of the first important clues in the early 1940s. Working with the fungi Neurospora and Penicillium, they found that "genes direct the formation of enzymes through the units of which they are composed." (Annas 1996) Each unit (a polypeptide) is produced by a specific gene. This work launched studies into the chemical nature of the gene and helped to establish the field of molecular genetics.
"The fact that chromosomes were almost entirely composed of two kinds of chemical......

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Title: Dna
Approximate Word Count: 1877
Approximate Pages: 8 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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