Page 110 - BBC History The Story of Science & Technology - 2017 UK

People & Personalities / Who invented...

‘Big Bertha’ – the type of giant howitzer used by
Germany in the First World War, pictured here on
the western front in 1915 – was among the
DNA double helix: were earliest applications of hard molybdenum steel
Crick and Watson 80 years
behind the curve?

Who really
discovered…
DNA? Who really

invented…
Francis Crick and James
Watson are the scientists
most often associated with the computer?
the famous genetic molecule,
but their work in the 1950s Computers are far more than ultra-fast
came over 80 years after the number-crunchers. Based on a set of
identification of DNA by a instructions, a computer’s processor
Swiss physician searching and memory can – in principle, at least What connects ...
for the ‘building blocks’ of – perform an almost infinite range of
life. Friedrich Miescher had tasks, from word-processing to flying bacteria with
focused on proteins in cells, a plane. The first person to consider
but in 1869 he discovered building such a versatile device was
a strange substance also British mathematician Charles Babbage bombs?
lurking in the nuclei of the (pictured above), who in 1834 began
cells. He named it ‘nuclein’, drawing up plans for what he called an All living things need nitrogen to make
and suspected that it would “analytical engine”. His vision was to protein but, before nitrogen in the air can
prove at least as vital to cells create a device the gears, rods and be metabolised, it must first be converted
as proteins. wheels of which could be arranged – into ammonia by certain bacteria.
Nor were Crick and Watson programmed – to perform a myriad of
the first to show that Miescher tasks, from solving equations to These bacteria are essential because
was right. Their celebrated composing music. Sadly, only a frag- they make the nitrogenase enzymes that
discovery of DNA’s double- ment of this Victorian engineering catalyse the nitrogen conversion. Each
helix structure was prompted miracle was ever completed. nitrogenase molecule contains at its core
by key experiments by a team Just over 100 years later, another a single atom of the element molybdenum.
led by the American biochem- British mathematician, Alan Turing,
ist Oswald Avery, working at revived the idea of a ‘universal machine’ Molybdenum can also be added to steel
the Rockefeller University in and investigated its theoretical powers. to make very hard alloys. Construction of
New York. In 1944 these During the Second World War, his the German howitzer known as ‘Big
researchers published the code-breaking colleagues at Bletchley Bertha’, deployed in the First World War,
results of painstaking studies Park exploited some of these powers. involved one of the earliest applications
using bacteria that revealed Their electronic device, called Colossus, of molybdenum steel.
that DNA passed genetic broke some of the most secret ciphers
information from one organ- of the German High Command. The shells fired by Big Bertha, each of
ism to another. This went Historians still argue about who built which weighed nearly a tonne, contained
against the accepted wisdom the first genuine computer, but it’s the explosive trinitrotoluene (TNT), which
that proteins must be the generally agreed that by the late 1940s is made by reacting nitric acid with tolu-
carriers of genetic informa- engineers in both the US and Britain ene. Nitric acid is made from ammonia.
tion, as DNA was ‘obviously’ had succeeded in creating electronic
too simple a molecule to machines embodying Babbage’s dream.
perform such a complex role.
Crick and Watson agreed with
Avery – but the latter’s claim
to a Nobel Prize was blocked DREAMSTIME/GETTY
by sceptics until the 1960s,
long after his death in 1955.

110 The Story of Science & Technology