History of Genetics

Gregor Mendel established a fundamental law of inheritance, while Friedrich Miescher extracted DNA from the pus, and he called the substance nuclein.

Louis Pasteur developed the overall principle of vaccination and contributed to the foundation of immunology.

Oswald Avery, Colin Macleod and Macyn McCarty proved that DNA is the substance of controlling inheritance.

Francis Crick, James Watson and Rosalind Franklin discovered the structure of DNA. A few months later, Crick drew the structure of DNA helix and base pair.

When Jonas Salk waited for the clinical result of polio vaccine, he found out that the vaccine made of dead virus is equally effective as the live virus, but safer.  

John Kendrew published an important discovery of how amino acid is folded into protein.

An article published in 1848 pointed out that smoking made people slim, while another article in 1923 said the smoke was harmful, but would not bring damage to the mouth or the throat. But then in 1962, E. Cuyler Hammond wrote that lung cancer is related to smoking, and that is beyond all doubt.

Paul Berg is famous for his pioneering work involving gene splicing of recombinant DNA, a fundamental step in the development of genetic engineering.

Judah Folkman’s research shows that how turmor will increase the volume of blood to help its growth, and twenty years later, he elaborated on how to combat cancers by attacking blood vessels.

Cesar Milstein in “Monoclonal antibodies” explained how cloning could make cells immortal.

Stanley Prusiner published three articles in Scientific American, and indicated that infectious proteins can cause mad cow disease without DNA or RNA. This kind of infection path once 

Scientific American reported the whole issue of the popularity of AIDS. The first article written by Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier discovered that human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is the cause of AIDS. This issue has a profound influence in the study of viruses.

Kary Mullis wrote that when she drove along the mountain road of California during a night where the moonlight was shining, and her chemistry colleague slept away, he came up with the idea of polymerase chain reaction, and this method can duplicate DNA segment unlimitedly.

Dolly, the first mammal cloned from non-embryonic cell, and its DNA was the same as the lamb which was cloned.

The Human Genome Project took a total of 13 years and 3 billion to complete in 2003. It analyzed the whole genome of human. And now with an amount of USD1,000 and a couple of hours, you will have your genome analyzed.

The American President announced Precision Medicine Intiative, aims at collecting genetic data for one million American. This is to develop personalized medicine and rare diseases treatment.