Q 01/05

Which farm animal was Dolly, the first mammal cloned from an adult body cell, born in Scotland in 1996?

A) Goat

B) Horse

C) Sheep

D) Rabbit

Answer · why

C) Sheep

Dolly was a Finn-Dorset sheep, cloned at the Roslin Institute from a single mammary gland cell. Her preserved body is on display at the National Museu...

Q 02/05

Which organelle, normally inherited only from the mother, supplies most of a cell's chemical energy?

A) Mitochondrion

B) Lysosome

C) Golgi apparatus

D) Nucleolus

Answer · why

A) Mitochondrion

The mitochondrion carries its own small genome, similar to a bacterium's. In mammals the father's copies, delivered by the sperm, are usually destroye...

Q 03/05

Which chemist led the X-ray diffraction work at King's College London that produced Photo 51 of DNA?

A) Dorothy Hodgkin

B) Rosalind Franklin

C) Marie Curie

D) Barbara McClintock

Answer · why

B) Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin's team produced Photo 51 in 1952, an image taken by her student Raymond Gosling. Its diffraction pattern revealed the helical shape ...

Q 04/05

Which DNA base pairs with adenine in the double helix but is normally missing from RNA?

A) Cytosine

B) Uracil

C) Guanine

D) Thymine

Answer · why

D) Thymine

Thymine binds to adenine in DNA, while RNA uses uracil in its place. Chemically the two are close cousins: thymine is uracil with one extra methyl gro...

Q 05/05

Which Augustinian friar established the basic rules of heredity by cross-breeding pea plants in the 1850s and 1860s?

A) Gregor Mendel

B) Louis Pasteur

C) Thomas Malthus

D) Robert Koch

Answer · why

A) Gregor Mendel

Gregor Mendel tracked seven traits of his pea plants, among them seed shape and flower color. Recognition as the founder of genetics came only after h...