DNA Timeline
By Isaiah Heims and Noah Crumpton
1865
Gregor Mendel’s experiments on peas demonstrate that heredity is transmitted in discrete units.
1869
Frederick Miescher isolates DNA from cells for the first time and calls it “nuclein”.
1879
Walter Flemming describes chromosome behavior during animal cell division. He stains chromosomes to observe them clearly and describes the whole process of mitosis in 1882.
1911
Thomas Hunt Morgan and his students study fruit fly chromosomes. They show that chromosomes carry genes, and also discover genetic linkage.
1943
William Astbury obtains the first X-ray diffraction pattern of DNA, which reveals that DNA must have a regular periodic structure. He suggests that nucleotide bases are stacked on top of each other.
1953
Francis H. Crick and James D. Watson described the double helix structure of DNA.
1955
Joe Hin Tjio defines 46 as the exact number of chromosomes in human cells.
1961
Sydney Brenner, François Jacob and Matthew Meselson discover that mRNA takes information from DNA in the nucleus to the protein-making machinery in the cytoplasm.
1999
The first finished, full-length sequence of a human chromosome is produced.
2003
The finished human genome sequence will be at least 99.99% accurate.