Oswald Avery Research Paper

DNA was named the transforming principle 1944. The scientist who made the breakthrough was Oswald Avery, an immunochemist at the Hospital of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Avery had worked for many years with the bacterium responsible for pneumonia, pneumococcus, and had discovered that if a live but harmless form of pneumococcus was mixed with an inert but lethal form, the harmless bacteria would soon become deadly. He collaborated with Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty and began to a lot of bacteria. He noted that the substance did not look like a protein or carbohydrate but rather a nucleic acid, and with further analysis, it was revealed to be DNA. Avery's difficulty was no longer the transformation itself but to prove
that it was caused by DNA and nothing else, despite the fact that DNA had not been identified in pneumococci before and in defiance of the universal conviction, his own conviction at the start, that DNA was a monotonous molecule and genes were protein. In 1944, Avery and his colleagues published a paper in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, in which they outlined the nature of DNA as the 'transforming principle'. Although the paper was not widely read by geneticists at the time, it did inspire further research, paving the way for one of the biggest discoveries of the 20th century