1865- Mendel read his paper to the Brunn Society for Natural History.
1866- Mendel’s paper published in Proceedings of the Brunn Society for Natural History.
1900- Mendel’s work discovered by de Vries, Correns, and von Tschermak-Seysenegg.
1902- Boveri and Sutton demonstrated the presence of paired chromosomes (homologs) in diploid species.
1905- Bateson named the science genetics.
1908- Hardy and Weinberg formulated the “Hardy-Weinberg law” relating genotypic frequencies to gene frequencies in randomly mating populations.
1909- Johansen introduced the word gene.
1909-Garrod’s book Inborn Erros of Metabolism published.
1910- Morgan (Nobel Prize 1933) established the sex-linked inheritance of white eyes in Drosophila melanogaster.
1911- Morgan postulated the chromosomal basis of linkage.
1927- Mullar (Nobel Prize 1946) reported the use of the CIB technique to demonstrate that X rays are mutagenic.
1928- Griffith’s discovery of transformation in Diplococcus pneumoniae.
1931- Creighton and McClintock’s (maize) and Stern’s (Drosophila) papers appeared, demonstrating that genetic recombination is correlated with the exchange of morphological markers on chromosomes.
1940- Oliver’s demonstration of recombination within the lozenge functional unit in Drosophila.
1941- Beadle and Tarum’s work (Nobel Prize 1958) on Neurospora was published, establishing the one gene-one enzyme concept.
1944- Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty’s demonstration that the pneumococcal “transforming principle” is DNA.
1946- Lederberg (Nobel Prize 1958) and Tatum’s discovery of conjugation in bacteria.
1950- McClintock’s (Nobel Prize 1983) first paper on “transposable elements” in maize.
1952- Hershey (Nobel Prize 1969) and Chase demonstrated that the genetic material of bacteriophage T2 is DNA.
1952- Zinder and Lederberg’s discovery of phagemediated transduction in bacteria.
1953-; Watson and Crick (Nobel Prize 1962) worked out the double-belix structure of DNA using the X-ray diffraction data of Wilkins (Nobel Prize 1962) and the base composition data of Chargaff.
1955- Benzer’s first paper on the fine structure of the phage T4 rII locus.
1956- Tjio and Leven establish that the normal diploid chromosome number in humans is 46.
1957- Fraenkel-Conrat and Singer demonstrated that the genetic information of tobacco mosaic virus is stored in RNA.
1958- Meselson and Stahi’s demonstration that DNA replication is semiconservative.
1958- Kornberg’s (Nobel Prize 1959) isolation of DNA polymerase I from E. coli.
1959- Ochoa’s (Nobel Prize 1965) discovery of the first RNA polymerase.
1961- Jacob and Monod (Nobel Prize 1965) proposed the “operon model” for regulating gene expression.
1964-Colinearity between genes and polypeptide products established by the work of Yanofsky and colleagues and by Brenner and colleagues.
1964- Temin (Nobel Prize 1975) proposed the DNA provirus from of RNA tumor viruses.
1965- Holley (Nobel Prize 1968) worked out the first complete nucleotide sequence of a tRNA, a yeast alanine tRNA.
1966- The complete genetic code established by the work of Nirenberg and Khorana (Nobel Prize 1968) and coworkers.
1970- Nathans and Smith (Nobel Prize 1978) isolated the first restriction endonucleases.
1970- Reverse transcriptase of RNA tumor viruses identified by Baltimore (Nobel Prize 1975).
1972- First recombinant DNA produced in vitro in Berg’s (Nobel Prize 1980) laboratory.
1976- Bishop and Varmus (Nobel Prize 1989) demonstrate the protooncogene to oncogene relationship.
1976- Hozumi and Tonigawa’s demonstration of somatic rearrangements of genes encoding antibodies.
1977- Demonstration of introns in eukaryotic genes by Breathnach, Mandel, and Chambon and by Jeffreys and Flavell.
1977- Publication of the DNA sequencing techniques of Maxam and Gilbert and of Sanger, Nicklen, and Coulson (Sanger and Gilbert, Nobel Prize 1980).
1977- Publication of the complete 5387 nucleotide sequence of phage ?X174 by Sanger and colleagues.
1978- Discovery of “splicing” of adenovirus RNAs in three different laboratories.
1982- Publication of the complete 48, 50-2 nucleotide-pair sequences of phage lambada by Sanger and colleagues.
1983- Cech and Altman (Nobel Prize 1989) establish the existence of catalytic RNAs.
1988- Watson’s acceptance of job as coordinator of the “human genome project.”
1989- NIH Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee recommends approval of first human “gene transplant” experiment.
1989- Tsui, Collins, and colleagues clone the “cystic fibrosis gene,” the gene whose mutant alleles account for the majority of the cases of this dreaded disease that afflicts about one out of every 2000 children in the United States.
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