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Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin publishes his seminal work, On the Origin of Species, which was received with hostility by conservative Victorian society. In the work, Darwin proposed his theory of evolution, evidence for which he compiled over an extensive research period on board the HMS Beagle between 1831 and 1836. Essential to his theory was the notion of variation within a species and the hereditary nature of traits, both of which would be explained later by genetic research. -
Gregor Mendel
Often referred to as the 'Father of Modern Genetics', Mendeldedicated himself to the study of traits and heredity. His subject, between 1856 and 1863, were approximately 28, 000 edible pea plants, in which he observed hereditary traits such as colour, seed shape, plant height... From his research, he established the existence of recessive and dominant traits in organisms, which developed into Mendel's Laws of Inheritance. His work, given his limited scientific accreditation, was largely ignored. -
Friedrich Miescher
Miescher was a Swiss scientist who was the first person to isolate deoxyribonucleic acid, which he extracted from the nuclei of white blood cells. At the time of his research´s publication in 1871, the critical link between DNA and inheritance had not yet been made, but Miescher posited the idea that the two might be related later on in his scientific career. He was one of the key figures in early genetic research who paved the way for later discoveries in the field. -
William Bateson
Heavily influenced by the research methods of Charles Darwin, William Bateson studied the concept of genetic variation over the course of his career, meticulously collecting specimens, and noting the random nature of minor mutations within a species. He was also responsible for the dissemination of Mendel's work, which had hitherto been diegarded. This should not be underestimated- the rediscovery of Mendel's works was essential in the rapid progress made in the 20th Century in genetics. -
Sutton and Boveri
In two separate papers published in 1902 and 1903 repectively, Sutton and Boveri, working from the founding principles of Gregor Mendel, which had been redicovered by the turn of the 20th century, these two scientists established chromosomes as the basis for all genetic inheritance and that, over time, random mutation creates changes in the sequencing of information contained in the chromosomes. -
Thomas Hunt Morgan
Working from the discoveries of Gregor Mendel, Morgan famously studied the genetic makeup of fruitflies at Columbia University over a period of about 15 years. He demonstrated the location of genes in the chromosomes of cell nuclei, and that these formed the meachnical basis of heredity. -
Nikolai Koltsov
Through his extensive and turbulent (he was accused by the Ruian government of using science to support fascist notions of racial superiority and hereditary engineering) research career in Russia, Koltsov came to a key conclusion: that inherited traits would be passed down through what he described as a "giant hereditary molecule, contructed of two mirror strands" DNA! DNA! This proposal was more conclusively confirmed by Watson and Crick by 1953. -
Oswald Avery
In 1944, Avery carried out an experiment that demonstrated for the first time that genetic information is held in the cell nucleus, not in cell protein, as had previously been believed. -
Erwin Chargaff
Erwin Chargaff was a Hungarian biochemist who discovered two essential rules which underpinned Watson and Crick's eventual discovery of DNA's double helical structure. Chargaff's first rule was that, in DNA, the number of cytosine units was equal to the number of guanine units, and the number of adening units was equal to the number of thymine units (hinting at the structure of the bases in DNA). His second was that the relative amount of the four bases varied between species. -
Watson, Crick, Franklin and Wilkins
Working with photographs of DNA taken using x-ray crystallography by Rosalind Franklin & Maurice Wlikins, two research partners at King's College, James Watson & Francis Crick, were the first to model the double helix structure of DNA and publish their findings in the 71st issue of the scientific journal NATURE. The works of previous scientists in the field, notably Erwin Chargaff, informed their discovery. They won the Nobel Prize in 1962, with Wilkins. Franklin has received little recognition. -
Frederick Sanger
Sanger stiudied DNA sequencing and won two Nobel Prizes in chemistry. -
Marshall Warren Nirenberg
Nirenberg iscredited with being the first person to crack a long standing mystery in the field of genetics. He described the way in which cell translate genetic information into proteins - the "genetic code" -
Human Genome Project
An international scientific investigation that began in 1990 with funding from the National Health Institute in the United States, with the aims of mapping all the genes of the human genome and determining the base pairs that make up DNA. Japan, France, the UK, Germany and China were all heavily involved in the research. The finished genome was completed in 2003. -
Dolly the Sheep
Dolly the Sheep was the first living mammal to be successfully cloned by scientists from an adult somatic cell at the University of Edinburgh. The donor cell from which Dolly was born was taken from a mammary land, and she was cloned through a process known as somatic cell nuclear transfer
