8000 BCE
Domestication by selective breeding
Early farmers unknowingly practise genetic selection, transforming wild teosinte into maize and wolves into dogs. Source — Wikipedia:
Chronological Storyline (12 Milestones)
1866 CE
Mendel’s laws of inheritance
Gregor Mendel’s pea experiments reveal the basic rules of heredity, founding genetics. Source — Wikipedia:
1876 CE
Germ theory applied to medicine
Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur establish that specific microbes cause specific diseases, transforming health practice. Source — Wikipedia:
1953 CE
Structure of DNA
Watson, Crick, Franklin and Wilkins reveal DNA’s double helix, explaining how genes are copied. Source — Wikipedia:
1968 CE
Green Revolution high-yield grains
Norman Borlaug’s semi-dwarf wheat, adopted across Mexico, India and Pakistan, averts mass famine. Source — Wikipedia:
1973 CE
Recombinant DNA
Cohen and Boyer splice genes between organisms, launching genetic engineering and biotechnology. Source — Wikipedia:
1973 CE
Yuan Longping’s hybrid rice
Chinese agronomist Yuan Longping develops high-yield hybrid rice that greatly boosts food security in Asia. Source — Wikipedia:
1996 CE
Dolly the cloned sheep
Dolly becomes the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, proving somatic cells can be reprogrammed. Source — Wikipedia: )
2003 CE
Human Genome Project completed
An international consortium finishes sequencing the human genome, opening the genomic era of medicine. Source — Wikipedia:
2010 CE
Synthetic life & synthetic biology
The J. Craig Venter Institute builds a cell controlled by a chemically synthesised genome. Source — Wikipedia:
2012 CE
CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing
Doudna and Charpentier turn bacterial CRISPR into a precise, programmable gene-editing tool (Nobel, 2020). Source — Wikipedia:
2018 CE
First CRISPR-edited babies
Chinese scientist He Jiankui announces gene-edited infants, igniting a global bioethics reckoning. Source — Wikipedia: