- One criterion that we use
to define biological life,
is that the organism must have the ability to reproduce.
And the parent organism...
Must have the ability to pass on
to its offspring...
Some sort of material that contains
the instructions for living,
and we call this material genetic material.
What is genetic material?
Well, today we know that it's DNA,
or deoxyribonucleic acid.
But this wasn't always so obvious.
We're going to go through a couple
of earlier experiments that helped prove
to us that DNA is genetic material.
The first experiment we're going to discuss,
was one that was conducted by a scientist
by the name of Friedrich Miescher.
And Miescher lived from 1844 to 1895.
And Miescher worked with cells
that he took out of pus,
and today we know that these are lymphocytes.
And lymphocytes happen to have very large nuclei,
so if that's the cell, the nucleus might
look something like that.
And of course, there's this material inside the nucleus.
And because the nuclei are so large,
Miescher was able to isolate the material
inside the nucleus.
And he analyzed this material,
and came to the conclusion that it
was made up of two components.
The first was protein.
And the second was this substance
that acted like an acid,
and so he called it nucleic acid.
Nucleic because it came from the nucleus.
And so Miescher was the first one
to isolate and identify nucleic acid.
The next experiment we're going
to talk about was one conducted
by a scientist who lived at about the same time.
His name was Wilhelm Roux.
And he lived from 1850...
To 1924...
And Roux worked with cells that were dividing,
and he analyzed these cells,
so I drew a cell here, and I drew a couple
of the organelles also, let's just label them.
We have the endoplasmic reticulum here,
we have a couple of mitochondria.
And the singular is mitochondrion.
And then we have a couple of ribosomes,
I'm just going to abbreviate it like that.
And I also drew some vesicles.
And of course, in the center,
we have the nucleus.
And we're going to see that this cell
is undergoing mitosis right now,
so I'm going to draw the chromosomes
like that in the center, I'm going
to draw four chromosomes.
And I'm also going to draw the mitotic spindle.
which will help to separate the chromosomes
into the two cells that are being formed.
And what Roux noticed, was that when
the cell divided, so the organelles were not
necessarily distributed in a very organized
and even fashion, you can see the cell
on the left got three mitochondria,
the cell on the right only got two,
the cell on the left got three ribosomes,
the one on the right only got two,
but he noticed that the material
in the nucleus divided in an extremely organized fashion,
so each nucleus got exactly four chromosomes.
And so Roux concluded that because
the material in the nucleus was divided
in a very orderly and even fashion,
that that must be the genetic material.
And this makes sense, because the genetic material
or instructions for living,
is the most important thing that the parent cell
has to pass on to the daughter cell.
If one of the daughter cells didn't get
enough mitochondria, well, that's not so terrible,
as long as it has the correct instructions
for living, it can make more mitochondria.
If one of the cells accidentally didn't
get a ribosome, well, if it has
the right instructions for living,
it can make ribosomes.
So the conclusion here, was that genetic material
is made up of protein...
And, or, nucleic acid.
This was the conclusion that Friedrich Miescher's,
experiment and Roux's experiment helped prove.