Gregory Mendel publishes evidence for the discreteness and combinatorial rules of inherited traits.[1]
Fleming visualized chromosomes and was the first to detail how chromosome behave during animal cell division (mitosis).[2]
Carl Correns, Hugo de Vries & Erich von Tschermak discover Mendel's principles: this important event marks the beginning of modern genetics.[3]
Thomas Hunt Morgan shows that genes reside on chromosomes.[4]
Watson and Crick determine that deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is a double-strand helix of nucleotides.[5]
Restriction enzymes were discovered in studies of a bacterium, Haemophilus influenzae, enabling scientists to cut and paste DNA.[6]
Kary Banks Mullis invents the polymerase chain reaction enabling the easy amplification of DNA.[7]
The genome of bacterium Haemophilus influenzae is the first genome of a free living organism to be sequenced.[8]
Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a yeast species, is the first eukaryote genome sequence to be released.[9]
Caenorhabditis elegans becomes the first animal whose genome is totally sequenced.[10]
Successful completion of Human Genome Project with 99% of the genome sequenced to a 99.99% accuracy.[11]