Erwin Chargaff – Facts, Biography and Achievements

Erwin Chargaff was born on 11th August 1905 to a Bucovinean Jewish family in Czernowitz, Austria-Hungary (now Ukraine). After the start of World War 1, his family moved to Vienna, where he went to Maximiliansgymnasium (now called Gymnasium Wasagasse). After his time at Maximilians Gymnasium, he studied chemistry at Vienna College of Technology from 1924 to 1928 and earned a doctorate.

He was married to Vera Broido and had one son named Thomas Chargaff.

Chargaff took a fellowship position in Organic Chemistry at Yale University from 1925 to 1930. After that, he moved back to Europe and worked as an Assistant Professor (Chemistry) at the University of Berlin from 1930 to 1934. Then, he was forced to resign from his post in Germany due to the anti-Jew policies of the Nazi regime. He moved to Paris and worked as a research associate at the Pasteur Institute until 1934.

Fearing Jewish Prosecution by the Nazis, he immigrated to New York City in 1935. He worked as a research associate in biochemistry at Columbia University. He was promoted to the position of assistant professor in 1938 and Professor in 1952. He serves as the chair of the Department of Biochemistry from 1970 to 1974. After retiring as a professor emeritus, he moved his laboratory to Roosevelt Hospital, where he continued to work until his retirement in 1992.

Erwin Chargaff’s Introduction to DNA

Chargaff was a big fan of Erwin Schrödinger and his book, What is Life? Schrödinger suggested that gene was a hereditary code passed on from parents to newborns in that book. Chargaff was impressed by the research by Oswald Avery and his other colleagues at Rockefeller Institute. The research concluded that DNA is the functional unit of the hereditary code passed from parents to newborns. Other scientists were skeptical about the research, but Chargaff was immediately impressed by it. He wrapped up everything he had been working on and started working on DNA.

Erwin Chargaff – Contribution to DNA

After reading Avery’s experiment, Chargaff believed that all the living species on earth are different because of the difference in their DNA. Afterwards, he started working to seek evidence in support of his hypothesis with his colleagues Ernst Vischer and Charlotte Green.

Chargaff prepared DNA samples from different species. Vischer & Green tried to separate the DNA into its components using partition chromatography and analyse the components using ultraviolet spectrophotometry. Although the initial results were not groundbreaking, they suggested that the DNA samples taken from different species are different in nature. By 1949, he started to work on DNA bases.

Albert Kossel from the University of Berlin had discovered that DNA has four bases (in the acid-base sense): adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine. They were abbreviated as A, C, G, and T, respectively. Phoebus Levene had already proven that DNA consists of a long chain of repeating chemical units of the phosphate-sugar base. These repeating units were called Nucleotides. He established that each molecule of DNA consists of a large number of these nucleotides strung together.

Chargaff’s Rules: Erwin Chargaff’s contribution to DNA is of great importance. The Erwin Chargaff rules were his greatest contribution that changed the prevalent notions established by Phoebus Levene. Here are some of his most prominent achievements: 

• Fixed Ratios of Bases

He showed that, in natural DNA, the number of units of Guanine is equal to the number of units of Cytosine, and the number of units of Adenine is equal to the number of units of Thymine. However, other ratios such as G:A might be different from species to species. This is known as the first Erwin Chargaff rule.

G : C = 1 : 1 & A : T = 1 : 1

• Different Species have Different Amounts of Bases

The second Erwin Chargaff rule states that different species have different proportions of bases, i.e. adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine. The composition of DNA is different in different species.

Facts About Erwin Chargaff

Here are some of the lesser-known facts about Erwin Chargaff:

1. Chargaff got American Citizenship by Naturalisation in 1940.

2. When he was first immigrating to America in 1928 for a Milton Campbell Research Fellowship at Yale University, he was detained on Ellis Island for deportation. An immigration officer saw that the title of Chargaff was Doctor. The officer saw it suspicious because if Chargaff was indeed a doctor, why was he immigrating with a student visa? However, he was rescued by one of his colleagues at Yale University.

3. In 1947, Chargaff believed the notion that DNA has a shape of a Mobius Strip (which was proven to be false).

Conclusion

Chargaff despised the field of Molecular Biology. He declared that nature will never be understood by studying the molecules. In 1957, he rejected two papers from Microbiologist Arthur Kornberg as a referee for the Journal of Biological Chemistry. However, after widespread recognition of the paper, a new referee took over the Journal of Biological Chemistry in 1958. He published Kornberg’s paper on DNA polymerase. The Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Kornberg in 1959.

Chargaff’s rules never won him the Nobel Prize. However, Chargaff’s rules were awarded other recognitions like the National Medal of Science, Charles Leopold Mayer Prize, Heineken Prize, Pasteur Medal, etc.