I feel that this is a great read for anyone.
It's a true story with a bit of fictionalization about a group of boys in a West Virginia coal mining town during the Sputnik era.
It recounts their undying efforts to 'git 'er done against strong opposition.
it's not DNA. DNA is a specific chemical compound.
It sounds like these people found some arsenic in the bacteria and decided, with nothing to base it on, that it was part of the organism's DNA.