Whoosh!

Johannes Friedrich Miescher

Swiss physician and biologist. He was the first researcher to isolate nucleic acid.

Chills and flames, frost and inferno, fire and ice. The two scientists Mendel and
Miescher, who made the first great discoveries in genetics, had much in common; not
least the fact that both died obscurely, mostly unmourned and happily forgotten by
many. But whereas Mendels legacy perished in fire, Mieschers succumbed to ice. It is
Mieschers story we will now begin.

WHOOSH!

As a young man Miescher had trained to practice the family art of medicine, in his
native Switzerland. But a boyhood typhoid infection had left Miescher hard of hearing
and unable to use a stethoscope, or hear an invalids bedside bellyaching. Mieschers
father, a prominent gynaecologist, suggested a career in research instead. So, in 1868
the young Miescher moved to a lab in Germany which was run by the biochemist Feliz
Hoppe-Seyler. Though headquartered in an impressive medieval castle, Hoppe-
Seylers lab occupied the royal laundry room in the basement. Hoppe-Seyler found
Miescher a glamorous space next doorin the old kitchen.

Hoppe-Seyler wanted to catalogue the chemicals present in human blood cells. He

had already investigated red blood cells, so he assigned white blood cells to Miescher.
The chance to analyse something new appealed to Miescher.

To study the nucleus, Miescher needed a steady supply of white blood cells, so he
approached a local hospital. The clinic housed many chronically ill patients. Each day
a hospital orderly collected pus-soaked bandages and delivered the yellowed rags to
Miescher. Miescher had to smell each cloth and throw out the putrid ones. But the
remaining fresh pus was swimming with white blood cells.

Eagar to impress, Miescher threw himself into studying the nucleus. Miescher first
washed his pus in warm alcohol, and then acid, extracted from a pigs stomach, which
dissolved away the cells membranes. This allowed him to isolate a grey paste.
Assuming it was protein, he ran tests to identify it. But the paste resisted protein
digestion and, unlike any known protein, would not dissolve in salt water, boiling
vinegar or dilute hydrochloric acid. So Miescher tried elementary analysis; charring the
paste until it decomposed. He got the expected elements, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen,
and nitrogen, and 3% phosphorus; an element proteins lack. Convinced he had found
something unique, he named the substance nucleon. Nucleon was later called DNA.
WHOOSH!

In 1869 Miescher stopped by the laundry to show Hoppe-Seyler his findings. Far from
rejoicing, the older scientist screwed up his brow and expressed his doubts that the
nucleus contained any sort of special, non-proteinaceous substance. Miescher
protested, but Hoppe-Seyler insisted on repeating the young mans experiments step
by step, bandage by bandage before publishing. After two years of Mieschers labour,
his work was published. His was accompanied by an editorial by Hoppe-Sayler,
patronising Miescher for enhancing our understanding of pus.

WHOOSH!

Meanwhile the representation of DNA was bolstered by other discoveries. Nuclein was
intriguing people. Miescher lucked out, frankly, when nuclein became a respectable
object of inquiry; his career had been stalled. After his stint in Germany Miescher
moved home to Switzerland, but his new institute refused him his own lab. Instead
Miescher got one corner in a common room and had to carry out chemical analyses in
an old hallway. His new job also required him to teach. This was a huge feat for a
broken man with little self confidence. Miescher had a frosty demeanour. Students
remember him as insecure, relentless and difficult to understand. We like to think of
scientific heroes as having electric personalities, but Miescher lacked even basic
charisma.

Because of his atrocious teaching, Mieschers self-esteem was further eroded. So, he
rededicated himself to research. Upholding what one observer called his fetish of
examining objectionable fluids, Miescher transferred his DNA allegiance from pus to
semen. The sperm in semen were nuclein-tipped missiles and provided payloads of
DNA. Miescher had a convenient source of sperm in the hordes of salmon that every
autumn and winter clogged the river Rhine near his university. Miescher could
practically dangle a fishing line from his office window. By squeezing their ripe testes
through cheesecloth, he isolated millions of bewildered little swimmers. The downside
was that salmon sperm deteriorated at anything close to comfortable temperatures. So
Miescher arrived at his bench in the chilly early hours before dawn and propped open
the windows, dropping the temperature to around 1.6 degrees Celsius, before working.
And because of a stingy budget, when his laboratory glassware broke, he sometimes
had to pilfer his ever-loving wifes fine china to finish experiments. Miescher concluded
that all cell nuclei contained DNA. In fact, he proposed redefining cell nuclei, which
come in a variety of sizes and shapes, strictly as containers for DNA. Though
Miescher was largely correct in his definition of the nucleus other scientists balked at
this Nucleus Theory. He had little time to defend his work as he still had to lecture. On
top of his lecturing, the Swiss government piled thankless and tedious tasks on
Miescher. Tasks like preparing reports on nutrition in prisons and primary schools.
WHOOSH!

Years of working through Swiss winters with the windows open took its toll and
Miescher contracted tuberculosis. He gave up DNA work altogether. Miescher
contracted pneumonia in 1895 and succumbed soon after.

After Mieschers death his uncle, a fellow scientist, gathered Mieschers

correspondence and papers into a collected work. He is noted for saying Mieschers
work will not diminish; it will continue to grow and his discoveries and thoughts will be
seeds for a fruitful future. Obituaries barely mention Mieschers work on nuclein and
DNA.

WHOOSH!

Perhaps the reason for the failure of both Mendel and Miescher to muster the support
they sought was that they began their research at a time when folk-theories dominated
peoples thinking about heredity.

One pervasive folk theory, maternal impressions held that if a pregnant woman saw
something ghoulish or suffered intense emotions, the experience would scar her child.
One woman who never satisfied an intense prenatal craving for strawberries gave birth
to a baby covered with red, strawberry-shaped splotches.

A beggar with one arm could spook a woman into having a one-armed child. Pregnant
women who pulled off crowded streets to pee in churchyards invariably produced bed
wetters.

WHOOSH!

DNA is a material, a chemical that sticks to your fingers. Genes have a physical nature
too; theyre made of long stretches of DNA. Genes are better viewed as conceptual,
not material. Genes are really information; like a story. DNA is the language with which
the story is written. DNA and genes combine to form larger structures called
chromosomes. Chromosomes reside in the cell nucleus, a library with instructions that
run our entire bodies. Despite the near simultaneous discovery of each, no one
connected DNA and genes for almost a century, and both discoverers died
uncelebrated.