
Friedrich Miescher spent the winter of 1869 rinsing pus off surgical bandages collected from a Tübingen clinic to isolate what he called nuclein, a phosphorus-rich substance from white blood cell nuclei that the world would take another 75 years to recognise as DNA
Working in a converted castle kitchen in Tübingen in 1869, the Swiss chemist Friedrich Miescher isolated a phosphorus-rich substance from the nuclei of white blood cells scraped off surgical bandages. He called it nuclein. It would take roughly seventy-five years for the world to recognise it as DNA.














