1865

Gregor Mendel showed that traits are controlled by discrete factors now known as genes.

2, 3

1869

Friedrich Miescher isolated DNA from the nuclei of white blood cells.

7

1903

Walter Sutton and Theodor Boveri hypothesized that chromosomes are the hereditary elements.

2

1905

William Bateson introduced the term “genetics” for the study of inheritance.

2

1908

G. H. Hardy and Wilhelm Weinberg proposed the Hardy-Weinberg law, the foundation for population genetics.

18

1910

Thomas H. Morgan demonstrated that genes are located on chromosomes.

4

1913

Alfred Sturtevant made a genetic linkage map of the Drosophila X chromosome, the first genetic map.

4

1918

Ronald Fisher proposed that multiple Mendelian factors can explain continuous variation for traits, founding the field of quantitative genetics.

19

1931

Harriet Creighton and Barbara McClintock showed that crossing over is the cause of recombination.

4, 16

1941

Edward Tatum and George Beadle proposed the one-gene—one-polypeptide hypothesis.

6

1944

Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty provided compelling evidence that DNA is the genetic material in bacterial cells.

7

1946

Joshua Lederberg and Edward Tatum discovered bacterial conjugation.

5

1948

Barbara McClintock discovered mobile elements (transposons) that move from one place to another in the genome.

15

1950

Erwin Chargaff showed DNA composition follows some simple rules for the relative amounts of A, C, G, and T.

7

1952

Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase proved that DNA is the molecule that encodes genetic information.

7

1953

James Watson and Francis Crick determined that DNA forms a double helix.

7

1958

Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl demonstrated the semiconservative nature of DNA replication.

7

1958

Jérôme Lejeune discovered that Down syndrome resulted from an extra copy of the 21st chromosome.

17

1961

François Jacob and Jacques Monod proposed that enzyme levels in cells are controlled by feedback mechanisms.

11

1961-1967

Marshall Nirenberg, Har Gobind Khorana, Sydney Brenner, and Francis Crick “cracked” the genetic code.

9

1968

Motoo Kimura proposed the neutral theory of molecular evolution.

18, 20

1977

Fred Sanger, Walter Gilbert, and Allan Maxam invented methods for determining the nucleotide sequences of DNA molecules.

10

1980

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric F. Wieschaus defined the complex of genes that regulate body plan development in Drosophila.

13

1989

Francis Collins and Lap-Chee Tsui discovered the gene causing cystic fibrosis.

4, 10

1993

Victor Ambrose and colleagues described the first microRNA.

13

1995

First genome sequence of a living organism (Haemophilus influenzae) published.

14

1996

First genome sequence of a eukaryote (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) published.

14

1998

First genome sequence of an animal (Caenorhabditis elegans) published.

14

2000

First genome sequence of a plant (Arabidopsis thaliana) published.

14

2001

The sequence of the human genome first published.

14

2006

Andrew Fire and Craig Mello win the Nobel prize for their discovery of gene silencing by double-stranded RNA.

8

2012

John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka win the Nobel prize for their discovery that just four regulatory genes can convert adult cells into stem cells.

8, 12