In 1869, a young Swiss chemist named Friedrich Miescher started collecting pus-soaked bandages from a nearby surgical clinic, dissolved the white blood cells, and isolated a strange phosphorus-rich substance from their nuclei that he called nuclein — the molecule the world would spend the next 75 years failing to recognise as DNA.

In 1869, a young Swiss chemist named Friedrich Miescher started collecting pus-soaked bandages from a nearby surgical clinic, dissolved the white blood cells, and isolated a strange phosphorus-rich substance from their nuclei that he called nuclein — the molecule the world would spend the next 75 years failing to recognise as DNA.

{“content”:” In the winter of 1869, a 24-year-old Swiss chemist named Friedrich Miescher walked to a nearby surgical clinic in Tübingen, Germany, and collected buckets of used bandages soaked in pus. He soaked them in dilute salt solutions, dissolved away the debris, and eventually isolated a strange, phosphorus-rich substance from the nuclei of the white blood cells. He called it nuclein. It was DNA. Nobody would understand what he had found fo…