Bacteriophages (Phages) Term Analysis

Knowing he could never bring himself to learn chemistry, Luria felt the wisest course was to send me, his first serious student, to a chemist.

He had no difficulty deciding between a protein chemist and a nucleic-acid chemist. Though only about one half the mass of a bacterial virus was DNA (the other half being protein), Avery’s experiment made it smell like the essential genetic material. So working out DNA’s chemical structure might be the essential step in learning how genes duplicated. Nonetheless, in contrast to the proteins, the solid chemical facts known about DNA were meager. Only a few chemists worked with it and, except for the fact that nucleic acids were very large molecules built up from smaller building blocks, the nucleotides, there was almost nothing chemical that the geneticist could grasp at.