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 substances,......

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Title: Dna: The Making
Approximate Word Count: 1756
Approximate Pages: 8 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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