Timeline

16 moments that made genetics what it is. Each one is a publication, a first or a decision that can be looked up.

1. 1866Gregor Mendel publishes his experiments on peas. They go almost unread for thirty-four years.
2. 1900De Vries, Correns and Tschermak independently rediscover Mendel’s laws.
3. 1905William Bateson coins the word “genetics” in a letter; he proposes it in public the following year.
4. 1908G. H. Hardy and Wilhelm Weinberg derive the equilibrium that bears their names.
5. 1910Thomas Hunt Morgan finds a white-eyed fly and ties a gene to a chromosome.
6. 1944Avery, MacLeod and McCarty identify DNA as the hereditary material.
7. 1953The double-helix structure of DNA is published.
8. 1958Meselson and Stahl show that DNA replication is semi-conservative; Crick states the central dogma.
9. 1961Nirenberg and Matthaei decipher the first word of the genetic code.
10. 1973Stanley N. Cohen and Herbert Boyer make the first recombinant DNA organism.
11. 1977Frederick Sanger publishes his method for sequencing DNA.
12. 1983Kary Mullis conceives the polymerase chain reaction; the gene for Huntington’s disease is mapped to chromosome 4.
13. 2003The Human Genome Project is declared complete.
14. 2012Jinek, Charpentier, Doudna and colleagues show that CRISPR-Cas9 can be programmed to cut chosen DNA sequences; Virginijus Šikšnys’s group shows the same independently.
15. 2022The first gapless, telomere-to-telomere sequence of a human genome is published.
16. 2023The first CRISPR-based therapy is approved, first in the United Kingdom, for sickle cell disease and transfusion-dependent beta thalassaemia.