Wyllie O Hagan

In recent times, science, and scientists have unravelled what DNA is, and because of their understanding, we, for the first time, are seeing massive break-throughs in healthcare.

Just over twenty years ago, testicular Cancer was a major killer of men, because scientists like Professor John Hartley, have been able to research, and understand the human DNA, testicular Cancer has a massively increased survival rate. Today 90% of men will survive this form of Cancer, providing it is identified early enough.
Mankind has known for a long time, that certain traits (genes), can be passed on from parents to offspring. For thousands of years, those involved in animal husbandry, explored this concept, by mating animals specifically for the production of quality offspring with distinctive traits. However, the science behind the heredity of these traits would not be known until the early 20th century.

In 1865, Gregor Mendel discovered that discrete units, or ‘genes,’ that are passed on from the parents, determine inherited traits. Mendel's work was largely ignored at the time, and it wasn't until the turn of the 20th century that three European scientists independently confirmed Mendel's results and began to uncover the laws of inheritance.

However, although it could be agreed that genes, were responsible for the transfer of our parents traits, it was never understood where the genes were and were they resided, or how the code of our lives could be transferred.
In 1944 Oswald Avery of the Rockefeller Research Centre in New York, classified DNA, the transfer fluid, of the genes. He was able to confirm that DNA, which we all have throughout our bodies, was the mechanism that allowed our parents traits to be adopted by the child.

The story however gets more exciting since although the transfer of the genes was understood, nobody had been able to read the code of the genes, which is DNA.

Identifying DNA as the code of life was a remarkable discovery. However, uncovering the structure of DNA would prove to be the key to understanding the role it plays in the formation of life. While working at King's College in London in 1952, crystallographer Rosalind Franklin produced X-ray diffraction images of DNA that revealed its helical shape. One of Franklin's photos, 'Photo 51' as it was famously named, led to the discovery of the double helix by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953. Photo 51 proved to be a driving force behind one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science.

In 1985, at a meeting of world’s scientists, in California, it was decided to map the sequencing of the human genome. Proposals were introduced for a global Human Genome Project and 10 years later, full-scale decoding began with a target completion date of 2005. However, in the year 2000, a full five years ahead of schedule, the first draft of the human genome was completed.