Timeline of biology and organic chemistry - Definition and Overview

A Timeline of significant events in biology and organic chemistry

Before 1600

• c. 520 B.C. - Alcmæon of Croton distinguished veins from arteries and discovered the optic nerve.
• c. 500 B.C.¹ - Sushruta - wrote Sushruta Samhita describing over 120 surgical instruments, 300 surgical procedures and classified human surgery in 8 categories. Performed cosmetic surgery.
• c. 500 B.C. - Xenophanes examined fossils and speculated on the evolution of life.
• c. 350 B.C. - Aristotle attempted a comprehensive classification of animals. His written works included Historia Animalium, a general biology of animals, De Partibus Animalium, a comparative anatomy and physiology of animals, and De Generatione Animalium, on developmental biology.
• c. 320 BC - Theophrastos (or Theophrastus) begins the systematic study of botany.
• c. 300 B.C. - Herophilos dissected the human body.
• c. 300 B.C. - Diocles wrote the first known anatomy book and was the first to use the term anatomy.
• c. 50-70 - Historia Naturalis by Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus) was published in 37 volumes.
• 130-200 - Claudius Galen wrote numerous treatises on human anatomy.
• c. 1010 - Avicenna (Ibn Sina or Abu Ali al Hussein ibn Abdallah) published his Canon of Medicine (Kitab al-Qanun fi al-tibb).

1600-1800

• 1628 - William Harvey publishes An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals
• 1658 - Jan Swammerdam observes red blood cells under a microscope.
• 1663 - Robert Hooke sees cells in cork using a microscope.
• 1668 - Francesco Redi disproves theories of the spontaneous generation of maggots in putrefying matter.
• 1676 - Anton van Leeuwenhoek observes protozoa and calls them animalcules.
• 1677 - Anton van Leeuwenhoek observes spermatozoa.
• 1683 - Anton van Leeuwenhoek observes bacteria.
• 1765 - Lazzaro Spallanzani disproves many theories of the spontaneous generation of cellular life.
• 1771 - Joseph Priestley discovers that plants convert carbon dioxide into oxygen.
• 1798 - Thomas Malthus discusses human population growth and food production in An Essay on the Principle of Population.

1800-1899

• 1801 - Jean-Baptiste Lamarck begins the detailed study of invertebrate taxonomy.
• 1802 - The term biology in its modern sense is propounded independently by Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (Biologie oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur) and Lamarck (Hydrogéologie). The word had been coined in 1800 by Karl Friedrich Burdach.
• 1809 - Lamarck proposes an inheritance of acquired characteristics theory of evolution.
• 1817 - Pierre-Joseph Pelletier and Joseph-Bienaime Caventou isolate chlorophyll.
• 1820 - Christian Friedrich Nasse formulates Nasse's law: hemophilia occurs only in males and is passed on by unaffected females.
• 1828 - Karl von Baer discovers the eggs of mammals.
• 1828 - Friedrich Woehler synthesizes urea; first synthesis of an organic compound from inorganic starting materials.
• 1836 - Theodor Schwann discovers pepsin in extracts from the stomach lining; first isolation of an animal enzyme.
• 1837 - Theodor Schwann shows that heating air will prevent it from causing putrefaction.
• 1838 - Matthias Schleiden discovers that all living plant tissue is composed of cells.
• 1839 - Theodor Schwann discovers that all living animal tissue is composed of cells.
• 1856 - Louis Pasteur states that microorganisms produce fermentation.
• 1858 - Charles R. Darwin and Alfred Wallace independently propose natural selection theories of evolution.
• 1858 - Rudolf Virchow proposes that cells can only arise from pre-existing cells.
• 1862 - Louis Pasteur convincingly disproves the spontaneous generation of cellular life.
• 1865 - Gregor Mendel presents his experiments on the crossbreeding of pea plants and postulates dominant and recessive factors.
• 1865 - Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz realizes that benzene is composed of carbon and hydrogen atoms in a hexagonal ring.
• 1869 - Friedrich Miescher discovers nucleic acids in the nuclei of cells.
• 1874 - Jacobus van 't Hoff and Joseph-Achille Le Bel advance a three-dimensional stereochemical representation of organic molecules and propose a tetrahedral carbon atom.
• 1876 - Oskar Hertwig and Hermann Fol show that fertilized eggs possess both male and female nuclei.
• 1884 - Emil Fischer begins his detailed analysis of the compositions and structures of sugars.
• 1898 - Martinus Beijerinck uses filtering experiments to show that tobacco mosaic disease is caused by something smaller than a bacteria which he names a virus.

1900-1949

• 1906 - Mikhail Tsvett discovers the chromatography technique for organic compound separation.
• 1907 - Ivan Pavlov demonstrates conditioned responses with salivating dogs.
• 1907 - Emil Fischer artificially synthesizes peptide amino acid chains and thereby shows that amino acids in proteins are connected by amino group-acid group bonds.
• 1911 - Thomas Morgan proposes that Mendelian factors are arranged in a line on chromosomes.
• 1926 - James Sumner shows that the urease enzyme is a protein.
• 1928 - Otto Diels and Kurt Alder discover the Diels-Alder cycloaddition reaction for forming ring molecules.
• 1928 - First antibiotic, penicillin, discovered by Alexander Fleming
• 1929 - Phoebus Levene discovers the sugar deoxyribose in nucleic acids.
• 1929 - Edward Doisy and Adolf Butenandt independently discover estrone.
• 1930 - John Howard Northrop shows that the pepsin enzyme is a protein.
• 1931 - Adolf Butenandt discovers androsterone.
• 1932 - Hans Adolf Krebs discovers the urea cycle.
• 1933 - Tadeus Reichstein artificially synthesizes vitamin C; first vitamin synthesis.
• 1935 - Rudolf Schoenheimer uses deuterium as a tracer to examine the fat storage system of rats.
• 1935 - Wendell Stanley crystallizes the tobacco mosaic virus.
• 1935 - Konrad Lorenz describes the imprinting behavior of young birds.
• 1937 - Hans Adolf Krebs discovers the tricarboxylic acid cycle.
• 1937 - Theodosius Dobzhansky links evolution and genetic mutation in Genetics and the Origin of Species.
• 1938 - A living coelacanth is found off the coast of southern Africa.
• 1940 - Donald Griffin and Robert Galambos announce their discovery of sonar echolocation by bats.
• 1942 - Max Delbruck and Salvador Luria demonstrate that bacterial resistance to virus infection is caused by random mutation and not adaptive change.
• 1944 - Oswald Avery shows that DNA carries the genetic code in pneumococci bacteria.
• 1944 - Robert Woodward and William von Eggers Doering synthesize quinine.
• 1948 - Erwin Chargaff shows 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.

1950-1989

• 1951 - Robert Woodward synthesizes cholesterol and cortisone.
• 1952 - Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase use radioactive tracers to show that DNA is the genetic material in bacteriophage viruses.
• 1952 - Fred Sanger, Hans Tuppy, and Ted Thompson complete their chromatographic analysis of the insulin amino acid sequence.
• 1952 - Rosalind Franklin uses X-ray diffraction to study the structure of DNA and suggests that its sugar-phosphate backbone is on its outside.
• 1953 - James D. Watson and Francis Crick propose a double helix structure for DNA.
• 1953 - Max Perutz and John Kendrew determine the structure of hemoglobin using X-ray diffraction studies.
• 1953 - Stanley Miller shows that amino acids can be formed when simulated lightning is passed through vessels containing water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen.
• 1955 - Severo Ochoa discovers RNA polymerase enzymes.
• 1955 - Arthur Kornberg discovers DNA polymerase enzymes.
• 1960 - Juan Oro finds that concentrated solutions of ammonium cyanide in water can produce the nucleotide organic base adenine.
• 1960 - Robert Woodward synthesizes chlorophyll.
• 1967 - John Gurden uses nuclear transplantation to clone a clawed frog; first cloning of a vertebrate.
• 1968 - Fred Sanger uses radioactive phosphorus as a tracer to chromatographically decipher a 120 base long RNA sequence.
• 1970 - Hamilton Smith and Daniel Nathans discover DNA restriction enzymes.
• 1970 - Howard Temin and David Baltimore independently discover reverse transcriptase enzymes.
• 1972 - Robert Woodward synthesizes vitamin B-12.
• 1972 - Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge propose punctuated equilibrium effects in evolution.
• 1972 - SJ Singer and GL Nicholson develop the fluid mosaic model, which deals with the make-up of the membrane of all cells.
• 1974 - Manfred Eigen and Manfred Sumper show that mixtures of nucleotide monomers and RNA replicase will give rise to RNA molecules which replicate, mutate, and evolve.
• 1974 - Leslie Orgel shows that RNA can replicate without RNA-replicase and that zinc aids this replication.
• 1977 - John Corliss, Jack Dymond, Louis Gordon, John Edmond, Richard von Herzen, Robert Ballard, Kenneth Green, David Williams, Arnold Bainbridge, Kathy Crane, and Tjeerd van Andel discover chemosynthetically based animal communities located around submarine hydrothermal vents on the Galapagos Rift.
• 1977 - Walter Gilbert and Allan Maxam present a rapid gene sequencing technique which uses cloning, base destroying chemicals, and gel electrophoresis.
• 1977 - Fred Sanger and Alan Coulson present a rapid gene sequencing technique which uses dideoxynucleotides and gel electrophoresis.
• 1978 - Fred Sanger presents the 5,386 base sequence for the virus PhiX174; first sequencing of an entire genome.
• 1982 - Concept of prions introduced by Stanley B. Prusiner
• 1983 - Kary Mullis invents the polymerase chain reaction.
• 1984 - Alec Jeffreys devises a genetic fingerprinting method.
• 1985 - Harry Kroto, J.R. Heath, S.C. O'Brien, R.F. Curl, and Richard Smalley discover the unusual stability of the buckminsterfullerene molecule and deduce its structure.
• 1986 - Alexander Klibanov demostrates that enzymes can function in non-aqueous environments.

1990-present

• 1990 - Wolfgang Krätschmer, Lowell Lamb, Konstantinos Fostiropoulos, and Donald Huffman discover that Buckminsterfullerene can be separated from soot because it is soluble in benzene.
• 1996 - Dolly the sheep is first clone of an adult mammal.
• 2001 - Publication of the first drafts of the complete human genome.
• 2003 - First virus produced 'from scratch'.

See also

• Timeline of medicine and medical technology

Footnote

Note 1: The date at which the Sushruta Samhita was compiled is uncertain. A Tribute to Hinduism (http://www.atributetohinduism.com/Hindu_Culture2.htm) says Sushruta lived in the 5th century B.C., and so the date 500 B.C. may be too early.