Edwin Chargaff

1
Edwin Chargaff

• Born 8/11/05
• Czernowitz
• Born to upper Middle class life style
• Peaceful and happy childhood

2
His Family

• Grandparents
• dad gave up dream to come home and help out the
  family
• Mom
• doesnt remember much but her soft touch and
  loving care
• Dad
• hard worker, but distraught by war and its tolls

3
Lost Stories

• Il Gran Rifiuto
• a turning point in his life
• disgust with the war
• contemplating on loyalties and profession
• Bluebird of Happiness
• very well read in English, Cooper, Poe, Twain,
  Whitman
• what about America?
• 2k for first research fellowship at Yale
• detainment on Ellis Isle for a week

4
Lost Stories (continued)

• Of Root and Destiny
• compares life to leaving Sodom and going to
  Gomorrah (which is better?)
• Life in the US as new immigrant
• Peopled seemed unhappy with poverty in their faces

5
Let the science begin

• Discoveries unto this point
• Avery with transformation of Pneumococcal Types
• Griffith R and S type mice experiments
• Nucleic acids structure and function
• thrown into the limelight of experiments
• Differences between RNA DNA
• Schrodinger - What is Life
• DNA, builders craft! Lets work on the nose of
  Cleopatra!

6
New Discoveries

• DNA Species Specific
• Develop Paper Chromatography
• X-Ray Crystallography
• Perfected techniques of experimental procedures

7
Base Pairing

• What a brilliant idea
• compare ratios of bases
• We get Base Pairing!
• AT types
• GC types
• Chargaff Rules
• sum of purines pyrimidines
• molar ratio of A to T 1
• molar ratio of G to C 1
• ratio of amino to keto groups is equal

8
On our way to the Double Helix

• Runnstrom interested in work (its spreading)
• DNA preps sent to BernalAtsbury for X-Ray
  Crystallography
• Cambridge - meets with Watson and Crick
• Tells them all he can, wanted to know if angles
  were correct
• Double helix was a result of conversation with
  the men
• Published in 1953, with little acknowledgment at
  first
• Eventually would have been found
• presentation can be found at http//www.msu.edu/w
  ilsonw5/