In the winter of 1869, a 24-year-old Swiss chemist named Friedrich Miescher made his way to a nearby surgical clinic in T\u00fcbingen, Germany, where he gathered buckets of used bandages drenched in pus. He immersed them in dilute salt solutions, eliminated the debris, and ultimately extracted a peculiar, phosphorus-rich substance from the nuclei of white blood cells. He dubbed it *nuclein*. It was DNA.<\/p>\n
For nearly a century, no one would grasp the significance of his discovery.<\/p>\n
The tale is one of the most unusual in the realm of biology: the molecule that contains the instructions for every living organism on Earth was initially extracted from infected surgical linens by a young man concerned about becoming a poor doctor due to his inability to hear his patients clearly. According to a [National Geographic account of Miescher\u2019s life](https:\/\/www.nationalgeographic.com\/history\/article\/friedrich-miescher-nucleic-acid-nuclein-dna-helix), a childhood illness with typhus had left him partially deaf, leading him to pursue laboratory research over clinical practice.<\/p>\n
## The bandage issue<\/p>\n
Antiseptic surgery was virtually non-existent in 1869. Joseph Lister had published his carbolic acid paper just two years prior, and most European hospitals had yet to adopt his techniques. Wounds frequently became infected. The bandages removed from patients at the surgical clinic near the University of T\u00fcbingen were soaked in pus \u2014 which is essentially a mixture of dead and dying white blood cells.<\/p>\n
For Miescher, this presented raw material. He arrived in T\u00fcbingen in 1868 to work in the laboratory of Felix Hoppe-Seyler, the German physiologist credited with laying the groundwork for biochemistry. Hoppe-Seyler tasked his young researcher with exploring the chemistry of white blood cells. Miescher aimed to comprehend life at the molecular level \u2014 an almost absurdly ambitious objective for a scientist during a period when the term “biochemistry” had not yet been firmly established.<\/p>\n
White blood cells were a suitable starting point because, unlike cells embedded within tissue, they circulate freely. Pus was the most accessible medium to obtain them in large quantities. Hence, Miescher collected bandages, removed the cells, and began his work.<\/p>\n
## The outcomes from the nuclei<\/p>\n
Miescher anticipated discovering the three biomolecules that chemists were already aware of: proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates. He encountered these. However, he also continually isolated a substance that did not behave like any of them.<\/p>\n
He tested it with pepsin, an enzyme that breaks down proteins. The substance survived. He applied iodine to check for carbohydrates. No reaction. He rinsed it with alcohol and ether to eliminate lipids. It persisted. Whatever it was, it was chemically different from anything recognized at the time. It was acidic. It was abundant in phosphorus, which was peculiar \u2014 phosphorus was not something anyone expected to find in such significant quantities within a living cell.<\/p>\n
Moreover, it originated specifically from the nucleus. Miescher devised a technique to strip away the cytoplasm of the white blood cells while keeping the nuclei intact, then proceeded to break them open. The enigmatic substance lay within. He named it *nuclein*, from the Latin term for kernel or nut. As [The Times of India summarized the incident](https:\/\/timesofindia.indiatimes.com\/science\/meet-friedrich-miescher-the-forgotten-scientist-who-discovered-dna-decades-before-it-was-understood\/articleshow\/130551500.cms), he was, unknowingly, the first individual to hold DNA in a test tube.<\/p>\n
## Two years of anticipation<\/p>\n
Miescher documented his findings and forwarded them to Hoppe-Seyler. His mentor did not publish them. Instead, he retained the paper for two years and repeated the experiments himself, as a previous student had once asserted they had discovered a new substance that ultimately proved to be a chemical illusion. Hoppe-Seyler sought confirmation.<\/p>\n
When the paper finally saw publication in 1871, it bore the title *On the Chemical Composition of Pus Cells*. The most significant biochemical discovery of the nineteenth century was hidden on page 19 of a 20-page report analyzing infected wound fluid. A reader had to wade through pages of tedious chemistry to discover the moment where Miescher casually mentions that he has isolated something completely novel.<\/p>\n
The molecule was imperceptible, abstract, and \u2014 to the readers of 1871 \u2014 seemingly meaningless. No one understood its purpose. Miescher himself later proposed it might be linked to the transmission of hereditary information, a notion that a coauthored history in [The Conversation credits as remarkably foresighted](https:\/\/theconversation.com\/our-unsung-hero-of-science-friedrich-miescher-the-man-who<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the winter of 1869, a 24-year-old Swiss chemist named Friedrich Miescher made his way to a nearby surgical clinic in T\u00fcbingen, Germany, where he gathered buckets of used bandages drenched in pus. He immersed them in dilute salt solutions, eliminated the debris, and ultimately extracted a peculiar, phosphorus-rich substance from the nuclei of white […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":373538,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"Default","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[179],"class_list":["post-373537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-source-scienceblog-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=373537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373537\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/373538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=373537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=373537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=373537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}