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Gregor mendal
Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), Father of Genetics A monk, Mendel discovered the basic principles of heredity through experiments in his monastery's garden. His experiments showed that the inheritance of certain traits in pea plants follows particular patterns, subsequently becoming the foundation of modern genetics and leading to the study of heredity.
Between 1856 and 1863 Mendel cultivated and tested some 29,000 pea plants -
Friedrich Miescher
isolated "nuclein," DNA with associated proteins, from cell nuclei. He was the first to identify DNA as a distinct molecule. Miescher researched the composition of lymphoid cells — white blood cells.
These cells were difficult to extract from the lymph glands, but they were found in great quantities in the pus from infections. Miescher collected bandages from a nearby clinic and washed off the pus. He experimented and isolated a new molecule - nuclein - from the cell. -
Erich Von Tschermak-Seysenegg
Austrian botanist, one of the co-discoverers of Gregor Mendel’s classic papers on his experiments with the garden pea. -
WWI begins
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Hermann Muller
Hermann Muller showed that X-rays could induce mutations.
Muller showed that mutations in one gene could alter the expression of another gene, implying that many fly characteristics depend on several interacting genes.
His Nobel prize-winning research showed that X-rays could induce mutations and he became instantly famous for it. Mutations are a major part of DNA as they occur in many forms and all throughout life. without mutations it is said we may never have evolved to what we are now. -
Edwin Hubble
discovery that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies -
photographs Pluto
Clyde Tombaugh photographs planet Pluto -
WWII Begins
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Erwin Chargaff
Chargaff was a biochemist of Austro-Hungarian background. He developed 2 rules that helped lead the charge towards understanding DNA. The first rule was that in DNA the number of guanine units equals the number of cytosine units, and the number of adenine units equals the number of thymine units. This hinted at the base pair makeup of DNA. -
Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Franklin produced the X-ray crystallography pictures of BDNA which Watson and Crick used to determine the structure of double-stranded DNA. Maurice Wilkins was already using X-ray crystallography to try to solve the DNA problem at King's College. The data confirmed the 3-D structure that Watson and Crick had theorized for DNA. In 1953, both Wilkins and Franklin published papers on their X-ray data in the same Nature issue with Watson and Crick's paper on the structure of DNA. -
Chase and Hershey
Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase are famous for the Hershey-Chase blender experiment that proved phage DNA, and not protein, was the genetic material. They preformed this experiment at Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Genetics at Cold Spring Harbor in 1952. -
Linus Pauling
Although he won two Nobel Prizes, he couldnt quite grasp DNA. He was obsessed with proteins and believed them to hold the hereditary information. He thought that nucleic acid was too simple to have the answer. This lead him to the idea of a triple helix structure of impossible molecular physics. -
Watson and Crick
W & C began their work at the University of Cambridge, and built their first accurate model of DNA in 1553. They used pieces of information gathered from other working biologists and were able to see the bigger picture. The won a Nobel prize for their work, yet some do not believe they are the true discoverers of DNA due to their "borrowing" of information. -
Seymour Benzer
In 1953, after Watson and Crick published their model of DNA, Benzer hatched his plan to get inside the gene by using bacteriophage with mutant rII genes. After ten years of work on the rII system, and prompted by observations of his two daughters, Benzer began studying how genes shape behavior. As a professor of biology at Caltech, he and his graduate student Ronald Konopka were the first to find a gene that controls an organism's sense of time. -
Francis Crick
Besides coming up with the double helix structure for DNA with James Watson, Crick also proposed the Central Dogma and Adaptor Hypothesis.After the "double helix" model, there were still questions about how DNA directed the synthesis of proteins. He focused on the "Central Dogma" where DNA was the storehouse of genetic information and RNA was the bridge that transferred this information from the nucleus to the cytoplasm where proteins were made. -
Zamecnik and Hoagland
They were biochemists who were interested in protein synthesis. DNA and genetics were biological problems until their results helped prove the Central Dogma. Their work with rat liver cells helped them discover soluble RNA, which was renamed tRNA. They worked at the Huntington Laboratory at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. -
Robert Kornberg
With both parents being well-respected scientists, it was not surprising that Roger Kornberg developed an interest and an enthusiasm for science.In 1972, Kornberg went to the Medical Research Council in Cambridge for postdoctoral work in X-ray crystallography. There he became interested in the X-ray patterns Aaron Klug obtained for chromatin. Using this and other experimental data, Kornberg eventually worked out the importance of histones to chromatin structure. -
Tiananmen Square massacre
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Mary-Claire King
After graduating from Carleton College with a degree in mathematics when she was just nineteen, King began pursuing her Ph.D. in genetics at the University of California, Berkeley, in the molecular evolution laboratory of Allan Wilson. King helped revolutionize evolutionary biology with the proof that chimpanzees and humans shared roughly 99% of their genetic material, suggesting that humans and chimps had diverged from a common ancestor more recently than had previously been believed. -
Dolly says baaaa
Roslin Institute: Dolly the sheep was cloned. -
Birthday
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John Sulston
Sulston had his first big breakthrough in 1976, when he described the cell lineage for a part of the developing nervous system of C. elegans, mapping the neuronal circuitry and the migratory pathways of the entire nervous system. He also showed that every member of the species undergoes exactly the same program of cell division and differentiation. Through this work, sulston built a cell-fate map of C. elegans, enabling other scientists to compare and use mutants to find genetic defects.
