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The Egyptians and Sumerians learned how to ferment, brew and make cheese around 2000BC. This marks one of the earliest advancements in biotechnology.
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Antonji Van Leeuwenhoek discovers microorgansims through his handmade microscopes calling them "little living animacules."
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Edward Jenner discovered what we now call vaccines through purposely infecting a boy with cowpox and then trying to infect the boy with smallpox. Luckily for the boy, he became immune to smallpox and never contracted the disease. (The word "vaccine" comes from the Latin word cow, vacca.)
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Mendel completed extensive experiments on pea plants leading to his theory of inheritance, He is responsible for the terms "dominant" and "recessive" in regards to genes.
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Burbank is is sometimes called the father of modern plant breeding. He is responsible for creating around 800 new variations of plants: fruits, vegetables and flowers! It was one of his newly engineered potatoes that helped Ireland move forward after the potatoe famine that started in the 1840's.
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Louis Pasteur was responsible for many advances in the biotechnology field in his time. First, in 1871, Pasteur realized that contaminated milk makes people sick. As such, he developed the process of pasteurization to help limit this problem. Later, in 1881, Pasteur finds vaccines for bacteria that prevent cholera and anthrax in chickens. However, in 1885, his work is put to the test when he saves Joseph Meister, a boy who was bit by a rabid dog, by administering his untested rabies vaccine.
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This German scientist and doctor is known for discovering chromatin, which later lead to the discovery of chromosomes. On top of this, he is credited with being the first to present the idea of mitosis saying that all nuclei come from "another predecessor nucleus."
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Karl Ereky is the first one to use the term "biotechnology" in print. Some consider him the father of biotechnology.
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Dr. Fredrick Banting and Charles Best, his assistant, worked by experimenting on the pancreases of dogs to eventually discover insulin now used to treat diabetes!
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Sir Alexander Fleming discovers that penicillin mould can fight and kill bacteria. One of the first antibiotics is found by accident!
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On top of treating the sick and injured in rural China during the Spanish Civil War, Bethune is credited with being the first person to provide mobile blood transfussions at the front lines of this war in 1936.
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These two scientists are responsible for discovering that DNA is formed as a double helix structure. This is a huge breakthrough that helped to explain how so much genetic material can be stored in every cell of an organism.
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Jonas Salk liscenced his polio vaccine for widespread use in 1955. A large immunization campaign, with help from the University of Toronto, helped make this a safe process.
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James Till and Ernest McCulloch discover that cells begin as stem cells and then differentiate to perform their specific function.
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Borlaug was a plant breeder who won the Nobel Prize for developing a strain of wheat that increased crop yeild by about 70%!
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Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen's work marks the "birth of modern technology." They are responsible for advances in recombinant DNA technology.
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Sanger, with help from collegues, is responsible for developing new methods to sequence DNA that increased speed and accuracy of the process. He was the first person to sequence a full genome of 5386 base pairs.
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Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) was developed by Kary Mullis, an American biologist, and allowed for a segment of DNA to be replicated thousands of times.
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This man is responsible for not only the Hepatitis B vaccine in 1986, but also well as over 40 other vaccines in his career: mumps, measles, Hepatitis A, rubella, pneumonia and many more!
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Chymosin, an enzyme used to replace rennet in cheese making, was the first genetically engineered food product. It is derived from the stomach lining of calves and was approved for use in 1990.
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The Human Genome Project was started in the US in 1990 to map out the sequence of base pairs and genes that make up the human genome! This was a world wide project that was completed in 2003.
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Sam Weiss, found that there are stem cells in the brain of even adult humans. This changed the way that scientists looked at how to heal brain related damage.
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Scotland is the first country to have a cloned mammal born, Dolly the sheep!
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The world's first cornea was grown in a laboratory at Ottawa Health Research Institute by May Griffith.
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This American scientist is working on understanding tissue repair and growth in organs. Specifically, her research looks at micro and nanotechnology for liver cells.
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These two scientists, Derrick Rancourt and Roman Krawetz, created a bioreactor that can chnage adult cells into (cancer-free) stem cells. This allows scientists to have stems cells that match the patients' without using embryonic cells!
