Who is the founder of Molecular biology and what is it about?

Question

Can help me in this question? It is from an assignment of my biology class.

Answer 1

I hope this helps - good luck with your assignment!

Molecular biology was established in the 1930s, the term was first coined by Warren Weaver in 1938 however. Warren was director of Natural Sciences for the Rockefeller Foundation at the time and believed that biology was about to undergo a period of significant change given recent advances in fields such as X-ray crystallography. He therefore channeled significant amounts of (Rockefeller Institute) money into biological fields.

Answer 2

Early biologist were able to look at organisms' gross anatomy. They could watch them, breed them, or dissect them but not look at the chemistry of how the bodies reactions occurred. Microscopes let us see some fine structure. The advent of technology such as the electron microscope allowed a new level of cellular exploration. But we could not see the molecular structure. There was no means of dissecting at that scale.
The first true manipulation we use in the lab came with Salvador Luria discovering restriction enzymes. His work lay the foundation of the method of subcloning that allows us to express genes in new cells. This has become the science of transgenics. With his work we could cut DNA into manageable pieces. Luria was one of Watson instructors. Watson, Crick, & Rosalyn Franklin determined the structure of DNA. She died just after the discovery but she did the crystallography. Now it was known what controlled inheritance and we could manipulate it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_enzyme
Sequencing was developed by Sanger and gave us the ability to check the DNA at the codon level. This resulted, along with subcloning, in the human genome project.
When I first worked I had to subclone a fragment of DNA then run a series of sequences to get a reliable sequence. By the time I moved to other research areas I could get a good read of 4-600 bases. Now th read is more than 1000 bp. But the chromosome 14 is 87,410,661bp long. The genome project was very automated in order to achieve what it has.
http://www.dnalc.org/ddnalc/resources/sangerseq.html

Dr Ed Southern developed the DNA gel blotting concept now called a southern blot.
Northen and western blots where named to parody the southern.
These three are a foundation for analysing the results of an experiment that took place on a molecular level.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_blot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_blot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_blot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Luria
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1969/luria-bio.html

My view of the science's history is slanted by the work I did. We separated molecular biology from biochemistry by doing the DNA/RNA manipulations in Molbio. Dept. We cloned the genes and did the initial protein expression in cells. If it was of interest as a protein for further work it was handed off to the biochemists in their own dept. They looked at the folding and active site function. Transgenics Dept. did the mouse work such as create a knockout.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knockout_mouse