Human Genome Project
It was the Moravian monk Gregor Mendel, working in his monastery's garden in the 1860s, who cracked the secrets of heredity, but it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that his insights were recognized and developed. Thanks particularly to the work of Thomas Hunt Morgan and his associates, working at Columbia University in New York, it was learned that the basic units of heredity, the genes, lie along thin, paired strings (chromosomes), in the centers of cells, and that these are not only the units of function—the things that carry the information used in building the finished organism—but also the units of heredity—the things passed on from one generation to the next.
In 1953, working in Cambridge, England, James Watson and Francis Crick confirmed the growing suspicion that the genes are long macromolecules of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), and famously they showed that the genes themselves consist of paired strings, twisted together in a double helix. The information carried by the genes comes not so much from the content of the DNA itself—a string or chain of four basic submolecules (nucleotides or bases)—but rather in the order of these submolecules along the chain. Information is read off from the DNA by another nucleic acid (RNA), and then this is used to pick up amino acids within the cell, which are then in turn strung together to make polypeptide chains, the building blocks (proteins) of new cells.
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