Matthew Meselson

Matthew Meselson was born on 24 May 1930 in Denver, Colorado. He earned a doctorate at the California Institute of Technology in 1957 and remained there on staff before moving to Harvard University in 1960. With Franklin Stahl, he devised a 1958 experiment using bacteria grown in a heavy nitrogen isotope to track how DNA replicates across generations, confirming that each new DNA molecule is built from one original strand and one newly made strand, the semiconservative replication the double helix model had predicted. The result has often been called the most beautiful experiment in biology.