The History of Genome Research
1865
The Austrian monk Gregor Mendel discovers the fundamental laws of heredity by conducting systematic hybridization experiments with bean and pea plants.
1869
The Swiss pathologist Friedrich Miescher isolates DNA from white blood cells' nuclei. He termed it "nuclein".
1884-88
Oscar Hertwig, Eduard Strasburger, Albrecht von Kölliker and August Weismann identify independently of each other the cell nucleus as the origin of heredity.
1902
Theodor Boveri and Walter Sutton propose that chromosomes bear hereditary factors in accordance with Mendelian laws.
1909
The Danish biologist Wilhelm Johannsen uses the name "gene" for the first time to characterize the heredity transmission of a certain feature.
1910
Thomas Hunt Morgan discovers the position of different genes on the chromosomes for the fruitfly Drosophila.
1944
Oswald T. Avery, Colin M. MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty prove that DNA is the carrier of hereditary information.
1950
Erwin Chargaff discovers that four building blocks of DNA, the bases, are aligned in a certain relationship with each other. He thus creates the prerequisites for working out the DNA double-helix model.
1951
Rosalind Franklin successfully takes the first x-ray structure pictures of DNA crystals. Her excellent pictures are the basis for the DNA double-helix model of Watson and Crick.
1953
James Watson and Francis Crick describe the double-helix structure of DNA.
1965
Heinrich Mathaei and Severo Ochoa decipher the genetic code: each of the 20 amino acids is defined by three letters of DNA "bases".
1977
Walter Gilbert, Allan Maxam and Frederick Sanger develop an effective method for DNA sequencing.
