DNA Lab Report
What is DNA? What do the letters stand for? What is it composed of? Where is it found? What is
it shaped like? Answer in full sentences.
Go to www.dnai.org > Timeline
Visit the above website, read a scientist’s biography, watch an interview, or work through an experiment
to identify scientists, dates, events, and facts that makeup the major advances (so far) in the science of
DNA. List the answer in front of each question below:
1. __________It took him eight years and more than 10,000 pea plants to discover the laws of
inheritance.
2. __________Even though he added an extra strand to the structure of DNA, he ultimately won two
Nobel Prizes: the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Nobel Peace Prize.
3. __________These two scientists used a common kitchen appliance to help show that phage
DNA carries instructions to make new viruses.
4. __________Next time you’re munching away at the movies, think of this Nobel-Prize winning
scientist who figured out the process of transposition in corn chromosomes.
5. __________When did Watson, Crick, and Wilkins win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
for their model of the structure of DNA?
6. __________This scientist found that some viruses have an RNA-dependent DNA polymerase
that was later named “reverse transcriptase.” He was one of three who shared in the 1975 Nobel
Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
7. __________J. Craig Venter’s company, Celera Genomics, worked on this very important project.
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8. __________Matthew Meselson and Frank Stahl invented this new technique in their quest to
prove that DNA replication is semi-conservative.
9. __________I first isolated DNA using pus collected from bandages at a local hospital. Since
white blood cells are a major component of pus, they were my source of DNA. Yuck!
10. __________The “fly room” at Columbia University was established through my efforts. Imagine
working in a room filled with bottle after bottle of fruit flies!
11. __________I showed that RNA could act as its own catalyst. Because of my work, it is no longer
correct to state, “all enzymes are proteins”.
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Go to www.dnai.org > Code > Finding the Structure > problem
As you work through the problem section, write, in your own words, the specific contribution that each
scientist made to the DNA story in the spaces provided below.
Scientist
Contribution
Friedrich Miescher
Phoebus Levene
Oswald Avery
Go to www.dnai.org > Code > Finding the Structure > players
View and listen to the videos and read the text at the site listed above. Write, in your own words, the
specific contribution that each scientist made to the DNA story in the spaces provided below.
Scientist
Contribution
Francis Crick
Erwin Chargaff
Rosalind Franklin
Linus Pauling
Maurice Wilkins
James Watson
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Answer the following questions, referring back to the materials you viewed above:
1. Watson and Crick knew that the triple helix model of DNA that Linus Pauling had proposed was
incorrect. What evidence did they have for such a conclusion?
2. The work of Rosalind Franklin provided a key piece of data for Watson and Crick’s model of
DNA. Summarize that evidence and how it was pivotal to the correct model being built.
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