Friedrich Miescher - 150 years of DNA

The Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research is a leader in the field of DNA and RNA research. DNA has become the icon of modern bioscience but few people realize that it was our namegiver, who - almost a century before Watson and Crick - laid the chemical groundwork for the molecular breakthroughs that followed. Today, 150 years after Miescher's first 'discovery' of DNA, we want to highlight his remarkable work. Born in Basel in 1844, Friedrich Miescher grew up in a well-respected family that was part of the academic elite. His father was a physician and taught anatomy at the University of Basel; his uncle was an embryologist. After Miescher graduated from medical school in 1868, he decided to pursue a career in research. At the University of Tübingen in Germany, he studied under renowned chemist and physiologist Felix Hoppe-Seyler, a pioneer of biochemistry who had discovered hemoglobin just a few years before.