DNA tells us who and what we are and also tells us what everything around us is. The world cannot be known if we do not understand what DNA is. DNA is the structure of life in the living system. Without DNA, we wouldn't be able to distinguish what from what. People have been trying to figure out what DNA looks like for years. It takes people like Freidrich Miescher, Watson, Crick and many others to discover and put together the pieces of what DNA looks like. DNA has been able to change court decisions in old cases in which they did not have the technology to find DNA samples like we do today. DNA helps in criminal investigations and DNA fingerprinting is the way forward to find better evidence. Many people are building the path to the DNA structure we know it as today. Around 1868, Freidrich Miescher isolated something no one had ever seen before in the nuclei of cells of that time. He called the compound “nuclein,” now called nucleic acid. Two years before, the Czech monk Gregor Mendel was experimenting with peas and was able to show that certain characteristics of peas, such as size or color, were inherited from different packaging. Today these packages are called genes. By the late 1940s, members of the scientific community knew that DNA was most likely the molecule of life. The scientific community knew that DNA has four bases: adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine, but they did not know what the structure of DNA looks like. Next came Sosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, who used X-rays to discover and understand the physical structure of the DNA molecule. In 1949, Ervin Chargoff showed that each organism has different amounts of DNA, but the amount of adeni... middle of paper ... people did not have the technology to find DNA people and see if they did it or not. After 27 years of imprisonment, they did a DNA test and found he was not the murderer and was free to go. On November 28, 1994, Lynn DeJac was convicted of strangling her daughter during a night of drinking. She was later released as new DNA evidence revealed that it was not she who killed her 13-year-old daughter, but Dejac's former boyfriend, Dennis P. Donahue. She was one of the first people in the country to have her murder conviction overturned based on DNA evidence. DNA and criminal investigations joined forces in this case. Without DNA, investigating crimes would be much more difficult, because you wouldn't be able to tell whether someone actually committed the crime or not. DNA is also who we are today. It lasts for a generation and gives us information about who we are.