Have you ever wondered why my eyes are this color? Or any questions about why we look the way we do. All of our characteristics depend on our genetics. These genetics are family traits that are passed down through our bloodlines. It all comes down to what are considered the fundamental building blocks of life, our DNA. Deoxyribonucleic acid is the real name for DNA. We've all heard about DNA for years, but what do we really know about it? What is DNA made of? In this article we will talk about this mini miracle called DNA. Like any good story, you have to start at the beginning. DNA was discovered in 1868 by a Swiss medical student named Johann Friedrich Miescher. Miescher was working with pus from a surgical laboratory, where he was studying white blood cells. It is in these white blood cells that he found the instruction booklet to make us what we are. It is important to note that DNA is present in every living thing. Even though Miescher discovered DNA in 1868, it would still be over 80 years before DNA was actually considered true genetic material. After Miescher discovered DNA, the medical and scientific communities of the time felt that DNA was too simple to actually be genetic material. It wasn't until James Watson and Francis Crick came along that DNA was recognized for all that it is. Watson and Crick were the ones who delved deeper into the configuration of DNA. What they would learn is that the structure is actually a double helix wound at a pitch of 34 degrees (Hallick, 1995). They would further discover that DNA is a long, complex polymer made up of repeating nucleotides. So complex and long that a number one human chromosome has been recorded to be 85 nanometers long and contains 220 million base pairs (“Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA),” 2012). The double helix structure of DNA consists of alternating sugar and phosphate bonds. Hydrogen holds these sugar and phosphate bonds together. We mentioned earlier that in the early days of the discovery of DNA, it was considered too simple to constitute truly viable genetic material. This was thought to be due to the four basic materials present in all DNA. These are adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine (Simon & Dicker, 2012).