WI: Prions discovered before Nucleic Acids linked to Reproduction

What if prions were discovered before nucleic acids were discovered to be the method of reproduction? Could this happen? I know Scrapie was known before DNA was ever heard of, could the discovery of Prions in the early 1900s have retarded the advancement of investigation of Nucleic Acids and the discovery of the actual mechanism for inheritance considering Prions have no nucleic acids but are kind of 'pseudo-alive'. Could it even have delayed DNA research perhaps 25 to 50 years?
EDIT: DNA was definitively linked to reproduction in 1952. So that is the deadline for Prion research.
 

Thande

Donor
Offhand, I don't think so. The only reason people ever started looking at prions at all was because they ended up being isolated as a side effect of the centrifugation used when isolating DNA. Diseases caused by prions might have been known back then, but not their mechanism.

I get what you're going for though (retard DNA research) and there are other ways to do that, such as having those studies on variegated leaf plants by that bloke whose name I can't remember come earlier on and lead to people dismissing the idea of DNA as being the carrier of genetic information (actually it was because the pigment was determined by the DNA in the chloroplasts rather than in the cell nuclei themselves, but they wouldn't know that at the time).
 
Top