History of Genetics - Classical Genetics

Classical Genetics

The significance of Mendel's work was not understood until early in the twentieth century, after his death, when his research was re-discovered by other scientists working on similar problems. Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns and Erich von Tschermak

There was then a feud between Bateson and Pearson over the hereditary mechanism. Fisher solved this in "The Correlation Between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance".

1865: Gregor Mendel's paper, Experiments on Plant Hybridization

1869: Friedrich Miescher discovers a weak acid in the nuclei of white blood cells that today we call DNA

1880 - 1890: Walther Flemming, Eduard Strasburger, and Edouard van Beneden elucidate chromosome distribution during cell division

1889: Hugo de Vries postulates that "inheritance of specific traits in organisms comes in particles", naming such particles "(pan)genes"

1903: Walter Sutton and Theodor Boveri hypothesizes that chromosomes, which segregate in a Mendelian fashion, are hereditary units; see the chromosome theory

1905: William Bateson coins the term "genetics" in a letter to Adam Sedgwick and at a meeting in 1906

1908: Hardy-Weinberg law derived.

1910: Thomas Hunt Morgan shows that genes reside on chromosomes

1913: Alfred Sturtevant makes the first genetic map of a chromosome

1913: Gene maps show chromosomes containing linear arranged genes

1918: Ronald Fisher publishes "The Correlation Between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance" the modern synthesis of genetics and evolutionary biology starts. See population genetics.

1928: Frederick Griffith discovers that hereditary material from dead bacteria can be incorporated into live bacteria (see Griffith's experiment)

1931: Crossing over is identified as the cause of recombination

1933: Jean Brachet is able to show that DNA is found in chromosomes and that RNA is present in the cytoplasm of all cells.

1941: Edward Lawrie Tatum and George Wells Beadle show that genes code for proteins; see the original central dogma of genetics