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E. Who are some important contributors in this field? †¢ Gregor Mendel- Austrian monk who demonstrated how variations in organisms were passed to the next generation and how they occurred; in an article Experiments in Plant Hybridization, in which Mendel experimented with controlled pea plant crosses, he showed how traits are inherited in a predictable way as bits information he called factors (genes) †¢ biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan- he and his students wanted to explicate the relationship between evolution, variation, heredity, and chromosomes; he showed that genes are actual substances that can be located on chromosomes, and he laid foundation for modern genetics †¢ biologist/theoretical physicist Max Delbrà ¼ck and geneticist Nicolai Timofeeff-Ressovsky- proposed a technique for estimating the smallest possible size of a gene; though it proved to be unusable, it enforced the idea that genes are stable molecules rather than theoretical units †¢ Linus Pauling- one of the people who founded molecular biology †¢ bacteriologist Oswald Avery- proposed that DNA was accountable for heredity; this was supported by Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase’s kitchen blender experiments †¢ biochemist Erwin Chargaff- discovered that in all DNA molecules, the nitrogenous bases of nucleotides had a one-to-one ratio-- the amount of adenine was the same as the amount of thymine and the amount of guanine is the same as the amount of cytosine †¢ James Watson, a biochemist, and Francis Crick, a biophysicist- proposed the double helix model; received pictures of crystalline DNA from crystallographer Rosalind Franklin and biophysicist Maurice Wilkins †¢ biochemist Frederick Sanger made the first thorough analysis of bovine insulin, a protein, which has molecules ma... ...iology can be used by scientists to study other things; expression cloning is used to recreate piece of DNA and put it into a cell to see the DNA in action †¢ DNA is helpful in studying evolution and taxonomic classification †¢ Studying what genes cause an egg to develop into a human being RELATE THIS FIELD TO OTHER FIELDS The field of molecular biology can be related to many fields, since it is basically a product of overlapping studies. It can be related to genetics; most molecular biologists have experience in genetics, and the one of the points of the field is finding out how genes for things such as disease are inherited. Molecular biology is also similar to biochemistry, which is chemical (such as enzymes) processes in living things. However, even though there is an overlap and similarities, molecular biology has to do more with nucleic acids/protein production.