Franklin William Stahl (1929– )

Franklin William Stahl studied DNA replication, bacteriophages, and genetic recombination in the US during the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. With his colleague Matthew Meselson, Stahl performed an experiment called the Meselson-Stahl experiment, which provided evidence for a process called semi-conservative DNA replication. Semi-conservative replication is a process in which each strand of a parental DNA double helix serves as a template for newly replicated daughter strands, so that one parental strand is conserved in every daughter double helix. Those findings supported the Watson-Crick Model for DNA replication proposed in 1953 by James Watson and Francis Crick, convincing many biologists about DNA’s structure and replication in the 1950s. Stahl’s genetics research, especially that of DNA replication, showed researchers how genetic information is distributed within a cell and is passed down from cell to cell.