Genetics History: The Top Ten Moments

A long time ago, in a galaxy rather close to here .......

This is where it all started, and the first stop on our genetics timeline. It was THE biggest moment in genetics history. Now whether you believe in intelligent design, the randomness and spontaneity of nature, or that life was ceded from precursor molecules that came smacking into our planet on the back of a comet, at some point a molecule or partial molecule began to copy itself. A neat trick that led all the way up to us, or down to us, depending on your view of humanity.

There are lots of theories about what actually happened. Which came first the protein or DNA? Or did RNA act as a catalyst for both protein and DNA synthesis? Whatever the picture at some point a few random bits of biological and chemical material came together, into a form that copied itself, which eventually led to the mighty structure we know as the cell.

One cell became two, two became four and so on until cells became tissues and eventually whole animals and species. It was an exciting time for the planet and for genetics. This hitherto barren rock was suddenly (well as sudden as a few billion years) full of life. Genes created millions of different life forms. There were mutations, speciation events, hybridisations, extinctions; species lived, species died, and all the while genes went quietly about their business. And that was pretty much the story for millions of years until another collection of genes came along ..... humans.

I'd like to think this was a big moment in genetics history. I'm pretty partial to being a human and genes created billions upon billions of us. Some of those humans started to become curious about life and how it all worked and slotted together. But it wasn't until an Austrian monk began spending a little more time in his garden than was usual that the picture started to become a little clearer.

Gregor Johann Mendel was an Austrian monk with a family background in farming. He developed an insatiable curiosity about inheritance. From 1856 to 1863 he cultivated more than 20,000 pea plants in the monastery's garden to study variation and heredity. Up until then a prevailing thought was that the next generation constituted a blend of characteristics from the previous one. Not just for peas but all life. It was Mendel who came up with the concept of hereditary units, now called genes. He showed that the inheritance of traits follow special laws. He also coined two terms we use today; dominant and recessive.

The work was seminal and truly groundbreaking so he published in 1866 and the whole wide world, ignored it. It lay in obscurity for about another 30 or so years, but it's full significance wasn't really understood until the 1920's.

The scientific sleuth who identified it was Friedrich Miescher. He called it 'nuclein,' an acidic substance found in a cell's nuclei. But its significance wasn't fully realised for many years.

A monumental moment in the history of human genetics. It's 1953 and more than half of America is glued to the television watching Lucy give birth on 'I Love Lucy,' Arthur Miller's 'Crucible' opens on Broadway and two scientists, Francis Crick and James Watson, publish a paper on the structure of DNA. It showed how DNA replicates and how inherited information is coded on in it, and was one of the 20th century's biggest scientific discoveries. It's said that when the pair finished their work, they walked into a pub in Cambridge in England and announced that "we had cracked the secret of life." Many of today's advances in molecular biology spring from their work.

They incorporated into their paper the research of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin. In 1962 Crick, Watson and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. But not Franklin. She had died in 1958 and the prize cannot be awarded posthumously.