Siddhartha Mukherjee in The New Yorker:
The discovery began, as many breakthroughs do, with an observation that didn’t quite make sense. In 1948, two French researchers, Paul Mandel and Pierre Métais, published a little-noticed paper in a scientific journal. Working in a laboratory in Strasbourg, they had been cataloguing the chemical contents of blood plasma—that river of life teeming with proteins, sugars, waste, nutrients, and cellular debris. Amid this familiar inventory, they’d spotted an unexpected presence: fragments of DNA drifting freely.
The finding defied biological orthodoxy. DNA was thought to remain locked inside the nuclei of cells, and not float around on its own. Stranger still, these weren’t whole genomes but broken pieces—genetic flotsam cast adrift from an unknown source. Mandel and Métais weren’t sure what to make of it. The scientific community, equally perplexed, largely ignored the paper for more than a decade. But biological mysteries rarely remain buried.
More here.
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