1. Johannes Friedrich Miescher was a Swiss physician and biologist.
18 Facts About Friedrich Miescher
1. 2.
Friedrich Miescher was the first scientist to isolate nucleic acid in 1869.
3.
Later, Friedrich 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.
4.
Friedrich Miescher came from a scientific family; his father and his uncle held the chair of anatomy at the University of Basel.
5.
Friedrich Miescher had an interest in music as his father performed publicly.
6.
Friedrich Miescher studied medicine at Basel, and in the summer of 1865, he worked for the organic chemist Adolf Stecker at the University of Gottingen.
7.
However, Friedrich Miescher's studies were interrupted for the year when he contracted typhoid fever, leaving him hearing-impaired.
8.
Friedrich Miescher felt that his partial deafness would be a disadvantage as a doctor, so he turned to physiological chemistry.
9.
Friedrich Miescher originally wanted to study lymphocytes, but was encouraged by Felix Hoppe-Seyler to study neutrophils.
10.
Friedrich Miescher was interested in studying the chemistry of the nucleus.
11.
Friedrich Miescher devised different salt solutions, eventually producing one with sodium sulfate.
12.
Friedrich Miescher then tried to isolate the nuclei free of cytoplasm.
13.
Friedrich Miescher subjected the purified nuclei to an alkaline extraction followed by acidification, resulting in the formation of a precipitate that he called nuclein.
14.
Friedrich Miescher found that this contained phosphorus and nitrogen, but not sulfur.
15.
Friedrich Miescher then went on to study physiology at Leipzig in the laboratory of Carl Ludwig for a year before being appointed professor of physiology.
16.
However, Friedrich Miescher's discovery played an important part in the identification of nucleic acids as the carriers of inheritance.
17.
Friedrich Miescher is known for demonstrating that carbon dioxide concentrations in blood regulate breathing.
18.
Friedrich Miescher died of tuberculosis in 1895 at the age of 51.