Martha Chase and Alfred Hershey
James Watson and Francis Crick
The DNA Double Helix
A host of scientific advances, from x-rays, to electron microsopes, to computer databasing, eventually led scientists to discover DNA testing as we know it today.
In 1952, Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase classified DNA as genetic material. One year later, in 1953, Drs. James Watson and Francis Crick to correctly identified the double-helix model of DNA structure (for which they later won the nobel prize with Maurice Wilkins and additional credit now give to Rosalind Franklin).
DNA appears in the nucleus of almost all cells and contains genetic information - instructions for how cells develop and grow into human beings. Inside human cells, DNA is found in 23 pairs of chromosomes – one half of the pair comes from a child's biological father and the other half from the child's biological mother.
DNA is a string of molecules, millions of molecules long (specifically, Adenine, Thymine, Guanine, and Cytosine, represented by the letters A, T, G, and C). The combination of molecules is uniquely different for each person - ther are literally billions upon billions of possibilities. DNA testing provides a very high power of exclusion – typically 99.99% or greater! Because of its high power of exclusion, DNA testing is also known as genetic fingerprinting.
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