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A Selected Timeline of the
History of Modern Biology and Medicine
(mostly from that infallible source know as Wikipedia: 1, 2) (bold entries are British or British related)(bold, red entries are those upon which we will concentrate) Please to do not memorize this list. It will serve as a road map to our travels this semester. 1518 - College of Physicians founded, now known as Royal College of Physicians of London 1540 - 1604 William Clowes (surgeon) 1553 - Miguel Serveto describes the circulation of blood through the lungs He is accused of heresy and burned at the stake 1556 - Amato Lusitano describes venous valves in the Azigos vein 1559 - Realdo Colombo describes the circulation of blood through the lungs in detail 1603 - Girolamo Fabrici studies leg veins and notices that they have valves which allow blood to flow only toward the heart 1628 - William Harvey published An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals 1651 - William Harvey concluded that all animals, including mammals, develop from eggs, and spontaneous generation of any animal from mud or excrement was an impossibility 1658 - Jan Swammerdam (Dutch) observed red blood cells under a microscope 1663 - Robert Hooke saw cells in cork using a microscope 1668 - Francesco Redi (Italian) disproved spontaneous generation by showing that fly maggots only appear on pieces of meat in jars if the jars are open to the air, jars covered with cheesecloth contained no flies 1672 - Marcello Malpighi (Italian) published the first description of chick development, including the formation of muscle somites, circulation, and nervous system 1676 - Anton van Leeuwenhoek (Dutch) observed protozoa and calls them animalcules 1677 - Anton van Leeuwenhoek observed spermatozoa 1683 - Anton van Leeuwenhoek observed bacteria Leeuwenhoek's discoveries renew the question of spontaneous generation in microorganisms 1688-1752 William Cheselden: Published "Anatomy of the Human Body" medical text, first surgical recovery from blindness 1701 - Giacomo Pylarini gives the first smallpox inoculations in Europe to the children of the English ambassador to Constantinople - they were widely practiced in the east before then (variolation) 1714 - 1789 Percivall Pott: the first scientist to demonstrate that a cancer may be caused by an environmental carcinogen 1720 - Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: brought smallpox vaccination (variolation) to England 1728 - 1793 John Hunter (surgeon): advocate of careful observation and scientific method in medicine, collaborator with Edward Jenner, smallpox vaccine 1736 - Claudius Aymand performs the first successful appendectomy 1744 - 1795 Pierre-Joseph Desault (French): First surgical periodical 1747 - James Lind (Scottish) discovers that citrus fruits prevent scurvy 1767 - Kaspar Friedrich Wolff (German) argued that the tissues of a developing chick form from nothing and are not simply elaborations of already-present structures in the egg 1768 - Lazzaro Spallanzani (Italian) again disproved spontaneous generation by showing that no organisms grow in a rich broth if it is first heated (to kill any organisms) and allowed to cool in a stoppered flask - he also showed that fertilization in mammals requires an egg and semen 1771 - Joseph Priestley demonstrated that plants produce a gas that animals and flames consume - those two gases are carbon dioxide and oxygen 1796 - Edward Jenner develops a smallpox vaccination method 1798 - Thomas Malthus discussed human population growth and food production in An Essay on the Principle of Population 1799 - Humphry Davy discovers the anesthetic properties of nitrous oxide 1801 - Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (French) began the detailed study of invertebrate taxonomy 1809 - Lamarck proposed a modern theory of evolution based on the inheritance of acquired characteristics 1813 - 1883 James Marion Sims (American): Father of surgical gynecology 1816 - Rene Laennec invents the stethoscope 1817 - Pierre-Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaime Caventou isolated chlorophyll 1818 - James Blundell performs the first successful human blood transfusion 1820 - Christian Friedrich Nasse (German) formulated Nasse's law: hemophilia occurs only in males and is passed on by unaffected females 1820-1910 - Florence Nightingale: Modern Nursing 1824 - J L Prevost and J B Dumas showed that the sperm in semen were not parasites, as previously thought, but, instead, the agents of fertilization 1826 - Karl von Baer showed that the eggs of mammals are in the ovaries, ending a 200-year search for the mammalian egg 1827 - 1912 Joseph Lister: Anti-septic surgery, Father of modern surgery 1828 - Friedrich Woehler synthesized urea; first synthesis of an organic compound from inorganic starting materials 1836 - Theodor Schwann discovered pepsin in extracts from the stomach lining; first isolation of an animal enzyme 1837 - Theodor Schwann showed that heating air will prevent it from causing putrefaction 1838 - Matthias Schleiden proposed that all plants are composed of cells 1839 - Theodor Schwann proposed that all animal tissues are composed of cells 1842 - Crawford Long (American) performs the first surgical operation using anesthesia with ether 1843 - Martin Barry reported the fusion of a sperm and an egg for rabbits in a 1-page paper 1849 - Elizabeth Blackwell is the first woman to gain a medical degree (received degree in USA) 1856 - Louis Pasteur (French) stated that microorganisms produce fermentation 1858 - Charles R Darwin and Alfred Wallace independently proposed a theory of biological evolution ("descent through modification") by means of natural selection Only in later editions of his works did Darwin used the term "evolution" 1858 - Rudolf Virchow proposed that cells can only arise from pre-existing cells; "Omnis cellula e celulla," all cell from cells - the Cell Theory states that all organisms are composed of cells (Schleiden and Schwann), and cells can only come from other cells (Virchow) 1864 - Louis Pasteur (French) disproved the spontaneous generation of cellular life 1865 - Gregor Mendel (Austrian) demonstrated in pea plants that inheritance follows definite rules The Principle of Segregation states that each organism has two genes per trait, which segregate when the organism makes eggs or sperm - the Principle of Independent Assortment states that each gene in a pair is distributed independently during the formation of eggs or sperm 1865 - Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz realized that benzene is composed of carbon and hydrogen atoms in a hexagonal ring 1869 - Friedrich Miescher (Swiss) discovered nucleic acids in the nuclei of cells 1870 - Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch establish the germ theory of disease 1876 - Oskar Hertwig and Hermann Fol independently described (in sea urchin eggs) the entry of sperm into the egg and the subsequent fusion of the egg and sperm nuclei to form a single new nucleus 1879 - First vaccine for cholera 1881 - Louis Pasteur develops an anthrax vaccine 1882 - Louis Pasteur develops a rabies vaccine 1884 - Emil Fischer began his detailed analysis of the compositions and structures of sugars 1890 - Emil von Behring discovers antitoxins and uses them to develop tetanus and diphtheria vaccines 1892 - Hans Driesch separated the individual cells of a 2-cell sea urchin embryo and shows that each cell develops into a complete individual, thus disproving the theory of preformation and showing that each cell is "totipotent," containing all the hereditary information necessary to form an individual 1895 - Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen discovers medical use of X-rays in medical imaging 1897 - Aspirin is invented in Germany 1898 - Martinus Beijerinck used filtering experiments to show that tobacco mosaic disease is caused by something smaller than a bacterium, which he names a virus 1900 - Correns, deVries, and Tschermak independently rediscovered Mendel's paper on heredity 1901 - Karl Landsteiner discovers the existence of different human blood types 1901 - Alois Alzheimer identifies the first case of what becomes known as Alzheimer's disease 1902 - Walter Sutton (American) and Theodor Boveri (German), independently proposed that the chromosomes carry the hereditary information 1903 - Willem Einthoven discovers electrocardiography (ECG/EKG) 1905 - William Bateson coined the term "genetics" to describe the study of biological inheritance 1906 - Frederick Hopkins suggests the existence of vitamins and suggests that a lack of vitamins causes scurvy and rickets 1906 - Mikhail Tsvet discovered the chromatography technique for organic compound separation 1907 - Paul Ehrlich (German) develops a chemotherapeutic cure for sleeping sickness 1907 - Ivan Pavlov demonstrated conditioned responses with salivating dogs 1907 - Hermann Emil Fischer (German) artificially synthesized peptide amino acid chains and thereby shows that amino acids in proteins are connected by amino group-acid group bonds 1909 - Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word "gene" 1911 - Thomas Hunt Morgan (American) proposed that genes are arranged in a line on the chromosomes 1917 - Julius Wagner-Jauregg discovers the malarial fever shock therapy for general paresis of the insane 1921 - Edward Mellanby discovers vitamin D and shows that its absence causes rickets 1921 - Frederick Banting (Canadian) and Charles Best discover insulin - important for the treatment of diabetes 1922 - Aleksandr Oparin proposed that the Earth's early atmosphere contained methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor, and that these were the raw materials for the origin of life 1923 - First vaccine for Diphtheria 1926 - First vaccine for Pertussis 1926 - James B Sumner (American) showed that the urease enzyme is a protein 1927 - First vaccine for Tuberculosis 1927 - First vaccine for Tetanus 1928 - Otto Diels and Kurt Alder discovered the Diels-Alder cycloaddition reaction for forming ring molecules 1928 - Alexander Fleming (Scottish) discovered the first antibiotic, penicillin 1929 - Phoebus Levene (American) discovered the sugar deoxyribose in nucleic acids 1929 - Hans Berger discovers human electroencephalography (EEG) 1929 - Edward Doisy and Adolf Butenandt independently discovered estrone (an estrogen) 1930 - John Howard Northrop (American) showed that the pepsin enzyme is a protein 1931 - Adolf Butenandt discovered androsterone 1932 - Hans Adolf Krebs discovered the urea cycle 1933 - Tadeus Reichstein artificially synthesized vitamin C; first vitamin synthesis 1935 - Rudolf Schoenheimer used deuterium as a tracer to examine the fat storage system of rats 1935 - Wendell Stanley (American) crystallized the tobacco mosaic virus 1935 - Konrad Lorenz described the imprinting behavior of young birds 1935 - First vaccine for Yellow Fever 1936 - Egas Moniz discovers prefrontal lobotomy for treating mental diseases 1936 - Enrique Finochietto develops the self-retaining thoracic retractor 1937 - Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin discovered the three-dimensional structure of cholesterol 1937 - Hans Adolf Krebs discovered the tricarboxylic acid cycle 1937 - Theodosius Dobzhansky applies the chromosome theory and population genetics to natural populations in the first mature work of neo-Darwinism, also called the modern synthesis, a term coined by Julian Huxley 1938 - Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer discovered a living coelacanth off the coast of southern Africa 1940 - Donald Griffin (American) and Robert Galambos announced their discovery of echolocation by bats 1942 - Max Delbruck and Salvador Luria demonstrated that bacterial resistance to virus infection is caused by random mutation and not adaptive change 1943 - Willem J Kolff build the first dialysis machine 1944 - Oswald Avery (American) shows that DNA carried the hereditary information in pneumococcus bacteria 1944 - Robert Burns Woodward (American) and William von Eggers Doering synthesized quinine 1945 - Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin discovered the three-dimensional structure of penicillin 1948 - Erwin Chargaff (American) showed that in DNA the number of guanine units equals the number of cytosine units and the number of adenine units equals the number of thymine units 1951 - The research group of Robert Robinson with John Cornforth publishes their synthesis of cholesterol, while Robert Woodward (Harvard University) publishes his synthesis of cortisone 1951 - Fred Sanger, Hans Tuppy, and Ted Thompson completed their chromatographic analysis of the insulin amino acid sequence 1952 - American developmental biologists Robert Briggs and Thomas King cloned the first vertebrate by transplanting nuclei from leopard frogs embryos into enucleated eggs - more differentiated cells were the less able they are to direct development in the enucleated egg 1952 - Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase (American) showed that DNA is the genetic material in bacteriophage viruses 1952 - Rosalind Franklin concluded that DNA is a double helix with a diameter of 2 nm and the sugar-phosphate backbones on the outside of the helix, based on x ray diffraction studies She suspected the two sugar-phosphate backbones have a peculiar relationship to each other 1952 - Jonas Salk develops the first polio vaccine (available in 1955) 1952 - Robert Briggs & Thomas King (Americans) clone frogs 1953 - John Heysham Gibbon: (American) invented Heart-Lung Machine 1953 - Inge Edler: Medical Ultrasonography 1953 - After examining Franklin's unpublished data, James D Watson (American) and Francis Crick published a double-helix structure for DNA, with one sugar-phosphate backbone running in the opposite direction to the other - they further suggested a mechanism by which the molecule can replicate itself and serve to transmit genetic information 1953 - Stanley Miller (American) showed that amino acids can be formed when simulated lightning is passed through vessels containing water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen 1954 - Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin discovered the three-dimensional structure of vitamin B12 1954 - Joseph Murray (American) performs the first human kidney transplant (on identical twins) 1955 - Marianne Grunberg-Manago and Severo Ochoa discovered the first nucleic-acid-synthesizing enzyme (polynucleotide phosphorylase), which links nucleotides together into polynucleotides 1955 - Arthur Kornberg (American) discovered DNA polymerase enzymes 1958 - John Gurdon used nuclear transplantation to clone an African Clawed Frog; first cloning of a vertebrate using a nucleus from a fully differentiated adult cell 1958 - Matthew Stanley Meselson and Franklin W. Stahl (American) proved that DNA replication is semiconservative in the Meselson-Stahl experiment 1958 - Rune Elmqvist: Pacemaker 1959 - Min Chueh Chang: In Vitro Fertilization 1959 - Max Perutz (born in Austria) comes up with a model for the structure of oxygenated hemoglobin 1960 - John Kendrew described the structure of myoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in muscle 1960 - S. Weiss, J. Hurwitz, Audrey Stevens and J. Bonner (Americans): discovered bacterial RNA polymerase, which polymerizes nucleotides under the direction of DNA 1960 - Robert Woodward (American) synthesized chlorophyll 1960 - Invention of Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) 1960 - First combined oral contraceptive approved by the FDA 1961 - J. Heinrich Matthaei cracked the first codon of the genetic code (the codon for the amino acid phenylalanine) using Grunberg-Manago's 1955 enzyme system for making polynucleotides 1961 - Joan Oro found that concentrated solutions of ammonium cyanide in water can produce the nucleotide adenine, a discovery that opened the way for theories on the origin of life 1962 - John Charnley: Hip Replacement pioneer 1962 - James W. Black: Beta Blockers to treat high blood pressure and other conditions 1962 - Sabin (American): First oral polio vaccine 1963 - Paul Winchell (American): Artificial heart 1963 - Thomas Starzl performs the first human liver transplant 1963 - James Hardy (American) performs the first human lung transplant 1966 - Genetic code fully cracked through trial-and-error experimental work 1966 - Kimishige Ishizaka discovered a new type of immunoglobulin, IgE, that develops allergy and explains the mechanisms of allergy at molecular and cellular levels 1966 - Lynn Margulis (American) proposed the endosymbiotic theory, that the eukaryotic cell is a symbiotic union of primitive prokaryotic cells 1967 - Christiaan Barnard (South African) performs the first human heart transplant 1968 - Fred Sanger used radioactive phosphorus as a tracer to chromatographically decipher a 120 base long RNA sequence 1969 - Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin deciphered the three-dimensional structure of insulin 1969 - William House: Cochlear Implants 1970 - Cyclosporine, the first effective immunosuppressive drug is introduced in organ transplant practice 1971 - Genetically Modified Organisms 1971 - Raymond Vahan Damadian: Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) 1971 - Godfrey Hounsfield: Computed Tomography (CT or CAT Scan) 1970 - Hamilton Smith (American) and Daniel Nathans discovered DNA restriction enzymes 1970 - Howard Temin and David Baltimore (Americans) independently discovered reverse transcriptase enzymes 1972 - Dean Kamen: Insulin Pump 1972 - Albert Eschenmoser and Robert Woodward synthesized vitamin B12 1972 - Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge (Americans) proposed an idea they call "punctuated equilibrium", which states that the fossil record is an accurate depiction of the pace of evolution, with long periods of "stasis" (little change) punctuated by brief periods of rapid change and species formation (within a lineage) 1972 - Seymour Jonathan Singer and Garth L Nicholson developed the fluid mosaic model, which deals with the make-up of the membrane of all cells 1973 - Mani Lal Bhaumik: Laser Eye Surgery 1974 - Giorgio Fischer (Italian): Liposuction 1978 - Last fatal case of smallpox[87] 1977 - John Corliss (American) and ten coauthors discovered chemosynthetically based animal communities located around submarine hydrothermal vents on the Galapagos Rift 1977 - Walter Gilbert (American0 and Allan Maxam present a rapid DNA sequencing technique which uses cloning, base destroying chemicals, and gel electrophoresis 1977 - Frederick Sanger and Alan Coulson presented a rapid gene sequencing technique which uses dideoxynucleotides and gel electrophoresis 1978 - Frederick Sanger presented the 5386 base sequence for the virus PhiX174; first sequencing of an entire genome 1982 - Stanley B Prusiner (American) proposed the existence of infectious proteins, or prions His idea is widely derided in the scientific community, but he wins a Nobel Prize in 1997 1982 - Recombinant DNA human insulin synthesized by Eli Lilly 1983 - Alfred G Gilman (American) and Martin Rodbell discover G-proteins 1983 - Kary Mullis (American) invented "PCR" ( polymerase chain reaction), an automated method for rapidly copying sequences of DNA 1984 - Alec Jeffreys devised a genetic fingerprinting method 1986 - Rita Levi-Montalcini and Stanley Cohen received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of Nerve growth factor (NGF) 1989 - Stephen Fodor (American): first DNA microarray 1990 - French Anderson (American) et al performed the first approved gene therapy on a human patient 1990 - Napoli, Lemieux and Jorgensen discovered RNA interference (1990) during experiments aimed at the color of petunias 1995 - Publication of the first complete genome of a free-living organism 1996 - Dolly the sheep was first clone of an adult mammal 2001 - Publication of the first drafts of the complete human genome 2002 - First virus produced 'from scratch', an artificial polio virus that paralyzes and kills mice 2007 - Yamanaka and Yu make stem cells from skin cells 2012 - Organs from stem cells |
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