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Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi (also known as Albucasis) is the first physician to describe the hereditary nature of haemophilia in his Al-Tasrif.
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The study of plant breeds contributes much to the understanding of inheritance.
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Erasmus Darwin writes Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life, in which he asks "shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filament is and has been the cause of all organic life?"
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Jean Baptiste Lamarck proposes his theory on the transmutation of species in his Philosophie Zoologique.
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Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species, proposing his general theory of evolution.
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Mendelian genetics becomes accepted and the search for the molecular basis of inheritance begins.
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Gregor Johann Mendel presents his paper describing his now-famous experiments on the hybridisation of pea plants. Mendel performed thousands of experiments to trace inheritance patterns of certain traits in pea plants. His results showed that the inheritance of particular traits (such as flower colour) obeyed simple statistical rules. Mendel's work was only widely accepted after his death, and it took until the early 20th century for its importance to be recognised.
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Friedrich Miescher discovers nuclein, a weak acid in the nuclei of white blood cells, which we today know as DNA.
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Hugo de Vries postulates that "inheritance of specific traits in organisms comes in particles", naming such particles "(pan)genes".
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William Bateson, a supporter of Mendel's work, coins the word genetics.
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Thomas Hunt Morgan argues that genes are on chromosomes, based on observations of a sex-linked white eye mutation in fruit flies.
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Alfred Sturtevant makes the first genetic map of a chromosome.
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Frederick Griffith discovers that dead bacteria can transfer genetic material to "transform" other still-living bacteria.
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Jean Brachet shows that DNA is found in chromosomes and that RNA is present in the cytoplasm of all cells.
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Edward Lawrie Tatum and George Wells Beadle show that genes code for proteins; the original central dogma of genetics is established.
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The role of the nucleus as the respository of genetic information in eukaryotes is established by Hämmerling in his work on the single celled alga Acetabularia.
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Oswald Theodore Avery, Colin McLeod and Maclyn McCarty identify the "transforming principle" as DNA.
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Molecular basis of inheritance is understood and molecular biology techniques are developed and refined.
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Erwin Chargaff shows that the four nucleotides are not present in nucleic acids in stable proportions, but that some general rules appear to hold (e.g., that the amount of adenine, A, tends to be equal to that of thymine, T).
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The Hershey-Chase experiment confirms that the genetic information of viruses that infect bacteria (and all other organisms) is DNA.
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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.
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The Meselson-Stahl experiment demonstrates that DNA is semiconservatively replicated.
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First letter of the genetic code deciphered by Marshall Nirenberg and Johann Matthaei.
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All 64 RNA three-letter code words (codons) for all 20 amino acids have been identified.
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Walter Fiers and his team at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology of the University of Ghent, Belgium, determine the first gene sequence.
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Richard Dawkins publishes his book The Selfish Gene, coining the word meme to describe "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture", the cultural analogue to a gene in that memes self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.
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First whole genome sequence determined by Fred Sanger's lab: bacteriophage Φ-X174.
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First genome sequence for a multicellular organism: Caenorhabditis elegans.
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Genome sequencing is commonplace and the race is on to make sense of the vast amounts of genetic information we now have access to.
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First draft sequences of the human genome are released simultaneously by the Human Genome Project and Celera Genomics.
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Successful completion of the Human Genome Project announced with a reported 99% of the human genome sequenced with 99.99% accuracy.
