DNA
DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is the hereditary material of humans and almost all other organisms — a long molecule of two interwound strands whose four chemical bases, adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine, encode the instructions for building and maintaining life. Its structure was not the work of one team: Friedrich Miescher isolated "nuclein" in 1869, Phoebus Levene mapped the nucleotide building blocks, Erwin Chargaff found the pairing regularities, Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins captured the crucial X-ray images, and James Watson and Francis Crick assembled the double-helix model published in Nature on 25 April 1953. Meselson and Stahl later proved replication semiconservative, Nirenberg cracked the genetic code, and the Human Genome Project (1990–2003) read the roughly 3 billion bases of the human genome, completed without gaps by the T2T consortium in 2022.