When you think of biology, you probably think of pristine labs and scientists in their little lab coats delicately putting mystery goo under microscopes and going "Hm, fascinating." I'm here to tell you that science's biggest breakthroughs were almost never that clean. Don't forget, we got penicillin because some guy (Fleming) forgot to close his petri dish and it got moldy while he was on summer vacation. But I digress, we make discoveries all the time, regardless of where. When was DNA discovered?
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DNA was first discovered in 1869 by Swiss scientist Friedrich Miescher while studying white blood cells in pus-soaked bandages, which sounds like the most disgusting way to learn about biological building blocks. Working in a makeshift lab in a castle's kitchen, Miescher isolated a substance he called "nuclein" from cell nuclei but didn't have the tools to figure out what it actually did. Nearly 80 years later in 1944 we learned that it was our genetic storage unit and less than a decade after that we finally saw its double-helix structure. Still, even for humanities sake I wouldn't look at pus-soaked bandages, I guess that's why I'm not in science.
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