1750 B.C.E. The Sumerians brew beer. 500 B.C.E. The Chinese use moldy soybean curds as an antibiotic to treat boils.
C.E. 100 Powdered chrysanthemum is used in China as an insecticide.
1590 The microscope is invented by Zacharias Janssen.
1663 Cells are first described by Robert Hooke.
1675 Antonie van Leeuwenhoek discovers bacteria.
1797 Edward Jenner inoculates a child with a viral vaccine to protect him from smallpox.
1830 Proteins are discovered.
1833 The first enzymes are isolated.
1855 The Escherichia coli (E. Coli) bacterium is discovered. It later becomes a major research, development and production tool for biotechnology.
1863 Gregor Mendel, in his study of peas, discovers that traits are transmitted from parents to progeny by discrete, independent units, later called genes. His observations laid the groundwork for the field of genetics.
1869 Friedrich Miescher discovers a weak acid in the nuclei of white blood cells in the sperm of trout that today we call DNA.
1877 A technique for staining and identifying bacteria is developed by Koch.
1878 The first centrifuge is developed by Gustaf de Laval.
1879 In Michigan, Darwin devotee William James Beal makes the first clinically controlled crosses of corn in search of colossal yields. &Walther Fleming discovers chromatin, the rod-like structures inside the cell nucleus that later came to be called chromosomes.
1889 Hugo de Vries postulates that "inheritance of specific traits in organisms comes in particles", naming such particles "(pan)genes."
1900 Drosophila (fruit flies) used in early studies of genes.
1902 The term "immunology" first appears.
1903Walter Sutton hypothesizes that chromosomes, which segregate in a Mendelian fashion, are hereditary units.
1906 The term "genetics" is introduced by William Bateson.
1908 Hardy-Weinberg law derived.
1910 Thomas Hunt Morgan shows that genes reside on