In Chemistry of Life, Dr Adam Rutherford explores how scientists began to probe ever more deeper into the cell in order to unlock the secret of life.
Chemistry Of Life picks up the story in T3bingen, 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, Friedrich 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. However, Miescher's discovery lay unnoticed for decades because nobody knew what the cell nucleus was for or why it was important.
But by turn of the 20th Century, scientists were beginning to observe cells in greater detail. Discovery after discovery began to reveal an unimaginably complex and exquisitely organised world within the cell. The nucleus was shown to contain chromosomes, the chromosomes to carry genes and the genes to contain essential information. That information was shown to be carried by one particular molecule, the molecule discovered by Miescher in 1869: DNA. So the "magic ingredient" at the heart of the cell - at the heart of life itself, had been discovered. Now scientists wanted to know how the DNA molecule could control every kind of living cell on Earth.
Adam travels to Switzerland to meet Walter Gehring, one of the pioneering scientists of the 20th Century. Together, they recreate some of the most bizarre and surprising experiments in all biology, first conducted by Gehring and his colleagues in the Eighties and Nineties. Back then, mutant flies with legs growing from their heads and eyes in random parts of their bodies helped show exactly how DNA controls the cell. They also demonstrated that the story of the cell is the story of the evolution of life itself. The cell has provided evidence that all life on Earth is related by a common ancestry.
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