Oswald Avery

Oswald Theodore Avery Jr. (1877-1955) was a Canadian-American physician and medical researcher who spent most of his career at Rockefeller Hospital in New York City and became a pioneer of molecular biology and immunochemistry. He is best known for a 1944 experiment, conducted with Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty, that systematically eliminated different molecular components from bacterial cells to show that a nucleic acid of the deoxyribose type, not protein, is the transforming principle carrying genetic information. The finding overturned the prevailing assumption that proteins carried heredity and helped open the way to Watson and Crick's discovery of DNA's structure. Avery was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize but never received it; Nobel laureate Arne Tiselius called him the most deserving scientist not to receive the prize.