History of genetics of the fruit fly "Drosophila melanogaster". In 1928, Frederick Griffith showed that genes could be transferred. In what is now known as Griffith's experiment, injections into a mouse of a deadly strain of bacteria that had been heat-killed transferred genetic information to a safe strain of the same bacteria, killing the mouse. A series of subsequent discoveries led to the realization decades later that the genetic material is made of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). In 1941, George Wells Beadle and Edward Lawrie Tatum showed that mutations in genes caused errors in specific steps in metabolic pathways. This showed that specific genes
Sulfonic acid respectively, while those of benzoic acid and acetic acid are 4.20 and 4.76, respectively. However, as a consequence of their strong acidity, their p"K" values cannot be measured directly, and values commonly quoted should be regarded as indirect estimates with significant uncertainties. For instance, various sources have reported the p"K" of methanesulfonic acid to be as high as −0.6 or as low as −6.5. Sulfonic acids are known to react with solid sodium chloride (salt) to form the sodium sulfonate and hydrogen chloride. This property implies an acidity within two or three orders of magnitude of that of HCl, whose