Friedrich Miescher

Johannes Friedrich Miescher (13 August 1844 – 26 August 1895) was a Swiss physician and biologist. He was the first scientist to isolate nucleic acid in 1869. He also identified protamine and made a number of other discoveries. Miescher had isolated various phosphate-rich chemicals, which he called nuclein (now nucleic acids), from the nuclei of white blood cells in Felix Hoppe-Seyler's laboratory at the University of Tübingen, Germany, paving the way for the identification of DNA as the carrier of inheritance. The significance of the discovery, first published in 1871, was not at first apparent, and Albrecht Kossel made the initial inquiries into its chemical structure. Later, Miescher raised the idea that the nucleic acids could be involved in heredity and even posited that there might be something akin to an alphabet that might explain how variation is produced. Early life and education Friedrich Miescher came from a scientific family; his father and his uncle held the chair of anatomy at the University of Basel. As a boy, he was shy but intelligent. He had an interest in music as his father performed publicly. Miescher studied medicine at Basel. In the summer of 1865, he worked for the organic chemist Adolf Stecker at the University of Göttingen, but his studies were interrupted for the year when he became ill with typhoid fever, which left him hearing-impaired. He received his MD in 1868. Career Miescher felt that his partial deafness would be a disadvantage as a doctor, so he turned to physiological chemistry. He originally wanted to study lymphocytes, but was encouraged by Felix Hoppe-Seyler to study neutrophils. He was interested in studying the chemistry of the nucleus. Lymphocytes were difficult to obtain in sufficient numbers to study, while neutrophils were known to be one of the main and first components in pus and could be obtained from bandages at the nearby hospital. The problem was, however, washing the cells off the bandages without damaging them.