Genetics

• 1865
  Gregor Mendel, Austrian botanist, formulates his laws of inheritance after exploration of the inheritance of certain traits in pea plants, thus founding the science of genetics
• February 28, 1953
  Cambridge University scientists James Watson and Francis Crick announce that they have determined the double-helix structure of DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, the molecule containing human genes
• April 25, 1953
  Francis Crick and James D. Watson publish an article describing the double helix structure of DNA
• 1956
  Soviet Russian biologists Alexander Spirin and Andrey Belozersky predict existence of messenger RNA, a large family of RNA molecules that convey genetic information from DNA to the ribosome
• 1965
  Werner Arber, a Swiss microbiologist and geneticist, discovers restriction endonucleases, an enzyme that cuts DNA, thus laying foundation for recombinant DNA technology
• 1973
  American geneticists Stanley Norman Cohen and Herbert Boyer transfer the gene for frog ribosomal RNA into bacterial cells, thus starting genetic engineering
• September 10, 1984
  Alec Jeffreys, a British geneticist, develops techniques for DNA fingerprinting and DNA profiling
• 1990
  Four-year-old Ashanthi DeSilva, who suffers from severe combined immunodeficiency, becomes the first patient to undergo successful gene therapy
• May 18, 1994
  Food and Drug Administration concludes that Flavr Savr, a genetically modified tomato, is safe for food use, making it the first commercially grown genetically engineered food
• April 14, 2003
  The Human Genome Project, an international scientific research project, is successfully completed, with 99 percent of the human genome sequenced to 99.99 percent accuracy
• May 7, 2010
  Scientists conducting the Neanderthal genome project announce that they have sequenced enough of the Neanderthal genome to suggest that Neanderthals and humans may have interbred