The chemistry of life milestones in genetics

Cells are, in a sense, just tiny bags of chemicals-so what "instructs" them to divide and function? This program shows how biologists addressed the question during the 19th and 20th centuries. Starting with Friedrich Miescher's discovery of nuclein, or DNA, the film examines Theodor Boveri's work with sea urchins, which clarified the role of chromosomes, as well as Thomas Hunt Morgan's study of inheritance in fruit flies and his introduction of the term gene. The contributions of Frederick Griffith, Maurice Wilkins, and the under-recognized Rosalind Franklin are held up as milestones on the path to the Watson-Crick double-helix model. Walter Gehring's mutation studies are also featured.

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"Cells are, in a sense, just tiny bags of chemicals-so what "instructs" them to divide and function? This program shows how biologists addressed the question during the 19th and 20th centuries. Starting with Friedrich Miescher's discovery of nuclein, or DNA, the film examines Theodor Boveri's work with sea urchins, which clarified the role of chromosomes, as well as Thomas Hunt Morgan's study of inheritance in fruit flies and his introduction of the term gene. The contributions of Frederick Griffith, Maurice Wilkins, and the under-recognized Rosalind Franklin are held up as milestones on the path to the Watson-Crick double-helix model. Walter Gehring's mutation studies are also featured."@en
"Cells are, in a sense, just tiny bags of chemicals-so what "instructs" them to divide and function? This program shows how biologists addressed the question during the 19th and 20th centuries. Starting with Friedrich Miescher's discovery of nuclein, or DNA, the film examines Theodor Boveri's work with sea urchins, which clarified the role of chromosomes, as well as Thomas Hunt Morgan's study of inheritance in fruit flies and his introduction of the term gene. The contributions of Frederick Griffith, Maurice Wilkins, and the under-recognized Rosalind Franklin are held up as milestones on the path to the Watson-Crick double-helix model. Walter Gehring's mutation studies are also featured. Original BBC broadcast title: The Chemistry of Life. A part of the series The Cell. (52 minutes) A streaming videorecording."
""Dr. Adam Rutherford explores how scientists began to probe ever deeper into the cell in order to unlock the secret of life. 'Chemistry of life' begins in Tübingen, Germany, where an unlikely experiment in 1869 provided the first clue. Using pus-covered bandages from injured Prussian War soldiers and the contents of a pig's stomach, Firedrich Miescher, a keen young scientist at Europe's first biochemistry lab, made a crucial discovery about the nucleus of all cells. He found a strange molecule never seen in nature before. Since it was only found in the nucleus, he called it "nuclein"; we now know it as DNA"--Container."