The Austrian biochemist Erwin Chargaff (born 1905) discovered that DNA is the primary constituent of the gene, thereby helping to create a new approach to the study of the biology of heredity.

Erwin Chargaff was born in Austria on August 11, 1905. He graduated from high school at the Maximiliangynasium in Vienna and proceeded to the University of Vienna. In 1928 he obtained a doctoral degree in chemistry after having written a thesis under the supervision of Fritz Feigl at Spath's Institute. He went to the United States in 1928 as a Milton Campbell research fellow at Yale University. He stayed until 1930, when he went to the University of Berlin as an assistant in the public health department. In 1933 he transferred to the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and in 1935 he returned to the United States to become an assistant professor of biochemistry at Columbia University. He became a full professor 17 years later and...