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1590's
During the 1590's two Dutch citizens experimented with eye glasses. They put several eye glasses in a tube and this is when they made the dicovery that the object at the end of the tube was enlarged quite largely. However it was it was Antony Van Leeuwenhoek and one of the pioneers of microscopy who in the late 17th century became the first man to make and use a real microscope. -
1665
In1665 Hooke presented the first published depiction of a microganism, the microfungus Mucor. Later Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek observed and described microscopic protozoa and bacteria. These important revelations were made possible by Hooke and Leeuwenhoek in fabricating and using simple microscopes. -
1876
Discovery of the transmission of disease by bateria. To do this he extracted Bacillus anthracisacterium from a sheep which had died of anthrax, grew it and injected a mouse with it. The mouse developed the disease as well. Koch repeated this process over 20 generations of mice, before he announced in 1876 that he had proved this bacterium caused anthrax. -
1880
Ferdinand Cohn classified bacteria into four groups based on shape (sphericals, short rods, threads, and spirals). He was also the first to classify algae as plants. -
1890
Louis Pasteur created the first vaccine for rabies and anthrax. -
1892
Dmitri Iosifovich Ivanovsky was a Russian botanist who discovered viruses, the tobacco mosaic virus in 1892. -
1928
Alexander Fleming discovered antibiotic penicillin. It was actually by mistake that Alexander felines get discovered penicillin. While studying influenza Fleming noticed that mould had occurred accidentally on a set of culture dishes being used to grow the staphylococci germ. Although it was not Fleming himself who developed penicillin into the drug that we use it for today he is still credited for the discovery and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945 in medicine. -
1946
1946 Lederberg and Tatum show that bacteria can reproduce
sexually. This shows that bacteria can exchange genes. -
1947
Armin Braun showed that 'A. tumefaciens' introduces a factor into plant cells that permanently transforms them into cancer cells. -
1953
James Watson and Francis Crick develop a
3D model of DNA structure. This
molecular structure straight away causes biologists to
understand that DNA is the genetic material. -
1988
Kary Mullis uses a heat stable enzyme to establish polymerase chain reaction technology. -
1990
Walter Reed discovered in 1900 that the yellow fever is transmitted by a particular mosquito species. Instead of direct contact. -
1995
Craig Venter, Hamilton Smith, Claire Fraser and other scientists at TIGR explained the first complete genome sequence of a microorganism.
