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In 1869, alone in a damp kitchen of an old castle in Germany, Friedrich Miescher spent months looking into the components of pus cells, and coincidentally ended up isolating a new substance from their nuclei. We would eventually come to know of this material as DNA, but the true magnitude of the discovery somewhat evaded the young researcher. Although Miescher hypothesized that it could play a role in the generation of new life, he wrote up his findings as a simple biochemical observation: unusual, but not urgent. His protocol was published two years later in dense German scientific prose with a title that translates to “On the Chemical Composition of Pus Cells” – hardly anything to be excited about. True to its name, the paper was mainly a methodological explanation for extracting the many components of white-blood cells. In fact, Miescher’s deliberation on the discovery of the DNA molecule goes but a little beyond calling it “nuclein” and noting its unusually high phosphorus content

In 1869, alone in a damp kitchen of an old castle in Germany, Friedrich Miescher spent months looking into the components of pus cells, and coincidentally ended up isolating a new substance from their nuclei. We would eventually come to know of this material as DNA, but the true magnitude of the discovery somewhat evaded the young researcher. Although Miescher hypothesized that it could play a role in the generation of new life, he wrote up his findings as a simple biochemical observation: unusual, but not urgent. Left: Tübingen Castle, Right: The kitchen, i.e. Miescher’s “lab”, within the cas

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