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Charles Darwin publishes his book on evolution. He concluded that species change by natural selection.
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Gregory Mendel sees that certain traits were passed on from parent to offspring during his work on the hereditary of pea plants. These traits would later become known as genes.
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Friedrich Miescher isolated DNA for the first time. This led to more discoveries about it.
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Archibald Garrod found out that the disease alkaptonuria is inherited. He saw it involved a rare recessive mutation. One of the first disease cause by genetics.
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Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word "gene". This was a milestone and genes would become nationally known.
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Thomas Hunt Morgan used fruit flies and the female and male chromosones to understand more about how they fit in with our genes and DNA
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Recombinant DNA technology is the joining of DNA from different species .
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Phoebus Levene concludes that DNA is made up of nucleotides which consist of a sugar, phosphate group, and a base.
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George Beadle and Edward Tatum through red bread mold showed that genes act by regulating chemical events, the "one gene, one enzyme" hypothesis.
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Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase's experiment proved the idea that genes are made of DNA.
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James Watson and Francis Crick see the structure of DNA as a double helix consisting of two strands of DNA that are held together by base pairs.
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Arthur Kornberg isolated DNA polymerase from E. coli bacteria. When he added the protein to a tube of salt solution containing DNA molecules and nucleotide building blocks, it was able to synthesize new strands of DNA.
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"Professor Jerome Lejeune and his colleagues discovered that Down syndrome, first classified by J. L. H. Down in 1866, is caused by trisomy 21 – that is, having three instead of 2 copies of chromosome 21. The extra copies of the genes on chromosome 21 affect the development of the brain and body."
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"Marshall Nirenberg, Har Khorana and Severo Ochoa and their colleagues elucidated the genetic code – showing how nucleic acids with their 4-letter alphabet determine the order of the 20 kinds of amino acids in proteins."
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Scientists discover 64 combinations of bases within the genetic code.
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Stanford and UCSF researchers fused a segment of DNA containing a gene from a frog with DNA from E. coli and placed the new DNA back into an E. coli cell.
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Richard Roberts' and Phil Sharp's labs showed that eukaryotic genes contain many interruptions, called introns.
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Genetically modified organisms can be patented, according to the US Supreme Court
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Humulin, a form of insulin produced by bacteria cultures, is the first genetically engineered drug.
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They found out how to read DNA
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Tommie Lee Andrew is the first person in the US to be convicted of a crime based on DNA evidence.
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The Cystic Fibrosis gene is discovered by Francis Collins and Lap-Chee Tsui.
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Gene therapy is successfully used on a patient for the first time.
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The gene responsible for Huntington's disease is discovered.
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Genetically modified tomatoe approved by FDA
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Draft of the human genome is presented.
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The entire human genome is sequenced.