When Friedrich Miescher isolated a strange phosphorus-rich substance from the pus-soaked bandages of wounded soldiers in a Tübingen laboratory in 1869, he called it nuclein and had no idea he had just held the first purified sample of DNA, seventy-four years before Avery would show it carried the code of life

When Friedrich Miescher isolated a strange phosphorus-rich substance from the pus-soaked bandages of wounded soldiers in a Tübingen laboratory in 1869, he called it nuclein and had no idea he had just held the first purified sample of DNA, seventy-four years before Avery would show it carried the code of life

In the winter of 1869, in a converted castle kitchen above the town of Tübingen, a 25-year-old Swiss doctor named Friedrich Miescher was rinsing pus from surgical bandages. He was trying to work out what white blood cells were made of. What he pulled from the nuclei of those cells was a grey, phosphorus-rich substance he had never seen described. He called it nuclein. It was the first purified sample of DNA, and it would take another seventy-fou…