Miescher had isolated various phosphate-rich chemicals, which he called nuclein (now nucleic acids), from the nuclei of white blood cells in Felix Hoppe-Seyler's laboratory at the University of Tübingen, Germany,[1] paving the way for the identification of DNA as the carrier of inheritance.

The significance of the discovery, first published in 1871, was not at first apparent, and Albrecht Kossel made the initial inquiries into its chemical structure.

Later, Miescher raised the idea that the nucleic acids could be involved in heredity[2] and even posited that there might be something akin to an alphabet that might explain how variation is produced.

Miescher studied medicine at Basel, and in the summer of 1865, he worked for the organic chemist Adolf Stecker at the University of Göttingen.

Miescher subjected the purified nuclei to an alkaline extraction followed by acidification, resulting in the formation of a precipitate that he called nuclein (now known as DNA).

The importance of his discovery was not apparent until Albrecht Kossel (a German physiologist specializing in the physiological chemistry of the cell and its nucleus and of proteins) researched the chemical structure of nuclein.