Nobel Prizes Explained: Finding Life In Pus

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When looking at the big picture, many things can look complex. The Sistine Chapel, computer software running Youtube, life. But when you look a little closer, and I mean a lot closer, then things start to slowly simplify. The Sistine chapel becomes certain arranged spots of paint, software is just 1s and 0s/on and off, and life is just made up of things like hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, phosphorous, linked together

I'm of course talking about DNA and RNA.These are the building blocks of life, found in every living organism, and is basically the assembly plan for how we are made and function. DNA and RNA are made up nucleotides – linked together to form the beautiful double helix.

It’s the nitrogen bases of nucleotides that link, and its also the nitrogenous bases that are unique between nucleotides
These are your adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine, or uracil, sometimes shortened to ACGTU. Sometimes you'll just see it as a long code of these letters.

Now it gets a heck of a lot more complicated than this, but for the purposes of this video, we’ll leave it here. We built complex civilizations but deep down, finding the simple building blocks of life, was lost in all of this.
Enter Albrecht Kossel

Ludwig Albrecht Kossel was a German physician born in 1853 who showed a substantial interest in chemistry at a young age, both before and during medical school. After graduation, he would work in the biochemistry lab, on a chemical isolated from pus. It was unique in that it contained a ton of phosphorous, and was highly acidic, something not seen in cellular substances at that time. This substance was initially called “nuclein” and due to its acidity, later became known as nucleic acid.
As he continued his work, he was able to isolate the five organic structures that made up nucleic acids – adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine – we now know that these are the building blocks of DNA, RNA, and thus life.
For his work on finding the chemical composition of DNA, and describing nucleic acids, he would win the Nobel Prize in 1910.

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