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Mendel traced the inheritance patterns of certain traits in pea plants and described them mathematically.
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William Bateson, a proponent of Mendel's work, coined the word "genetics"
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Bateson popularized the usage of the word "genetics" to describe the study of inheritance in his inaugural address in England.
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Thomas Hunt Morgan's student Alfred Sturtevant used the phenomenon of genetic linkage to show that genes are arranged linearly on the chromosome.
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Frederick Griffith discovered the phenomenon of transformation: dead bacteria could transfer genetic material to "transform" other still-living bacteria.
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Oswald Theodore Avery, Colin McLeod and Maclyn McCarty identified the molecule responsible for the transformation as DNA.
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The Hershey-Chase experiment showed that DNA (rather than protein) is the genetic material of the viruses that infect bacteria, providing further evidence that DNA is the molecule responsible for inheritance.
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James D. Watson and Francis Crick determined the structure of DNA using the X-ray crystallography work of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins that indicated that DNA had a helical structure.
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Kary Banks Mullis developed the polymerase chain reaction, providing a quick way to isolate and amplify a specific section of a DNA from a mixture.
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Through the pooled efforts of the Human Genome Project and the parallel private effort by Celera Genomics, they culminated in the sequencing of the human genome.
