Ядролық қышқылдарды ашқан швейцар ғалымы Иоганнес Фридрих Мишер

Swiss biochemist (1843 1895)

Johannes Friedrich Miescher (13 August 1844 – 26 August 1895) was a Swiss physician and biologist. He was the first scientist to isolate nucleic acid in 1869. Miescher also identified protamine and made several other discoveries. Miescher had isolated various phosphate rich chemicals, which he called nuclein (now nucleic acids), from the nuclei of white blood cells in Felix Hoppe Seyler's laboratory at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and even posited that there might be something akin to an alphabet that might explain how variation is produced.

Friedrich Miescher came from a scientific family; his father and his uncle held the chair of anatomy at the University of Basel. As a boy, Miescher was shy but intelligent. He had an interest in music as his father performed publicly. Miescher studied medicine at Basel, and in the summer of 1865, he worked for the organic chemist Adolf Stecker at the University of Göttingen. However, Miescher's studies were interrupted for the year when he contracted typhoid fever, leaving him hearing impaired. Miescher received his MD in 1868. Miescher found that this contained phosphorus and nitrogen, but not sulfur. The discovery was so unlike anything else at the time that Hoppe Seyler repeated all of Miescher's research himself before publishing it in his journal. Miescher then went on to study physiology at Leipzig in the laboratory of Carl Ludwig for a year before being appointed professor of physiology. It later found use, as protamine sulfate, in the stabilization of insulin (NPH insulin) and also as a reversal agent for the anticoagulant medicine heparin. Miescher and his students researched much nucleic acid chemistry, but its function remained unknown. However, Miescher's discovery played an important part in the identification of nucleic acids as the carriers of inheritance. The importance of his discovery was not apparent until Albrecht Kossel (a German physiologist specializing in the physiological chemistry of the cell and its nucleus and of proteins) researched the chemical structure of nuclein.