A Timeline of Biotech and Synthetic Biology
by piero scaruffi | (contact)
An appendix to the chapter on Biotech
All of these events are explained in my book "Intelligence is not Artificial".
See also: A Timeline of Modern Science
TM, ®, Copyright © 2017 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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1944: Oswald Avery discovers that genes are made of DNA 1953: Francis Crick and James Watson discover the double helix of DNA 
1961: Marshall Nirenberg and Heinrich Matthaei discover how the 4-letter genetic code gets translated into the 20-letter language of proteins 1964: Harvey Nathanson at Westinghouse makes the first MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical system) 1965: Robert Holley discovers transfer RNA 1969: Jon Beckwith isolates a gene 1971: First Biotech startups (e.g. Cetus) 1973: Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer invent a practical technique to produce recombinant DNA 1974: Waclaw Szybalski coins the term "synthetic biology" 1975: Paul Berg organizes the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA 1976: Genentech is founded 1977: Genentech clone a protein using a synthetic recombinant gene 1977: Fred Sanger invents a method for "sequencing" DNA molecules 1979: Stephen Terry at Stanford builds the first “lab-on-a-chip" 1980: The Supreme Court of the USA rules that life forms can be patente 1980: Genentech's IPO, first biotech IPO 1982: The first genetically produced medication, humulin, is approved for sale (Eli Lilly + Genentech) 1983: Kary Mullis invents the "polymerase chain reaction" 1983: Richard Feynman’s lecture "Infinitesimal Machinery“  1986: Leroy Hood invents a way to automate gene sequencing 1986: Mario Capecchi performs gene editing on a mouse 1990: William French Anderson's gene therapy 1990: First baby born via PGD (Alan Handyside’s lab)  1992: Calgene creates the first Genetically Manufactured Food (GMF), the "Flavr Savr" tomato 1993: Cynthia Kenyon discovers that a single-gene mutation can double the lifespan of the roundworm 1994: FlavrSavr Tomato 1994: Srinivasan Chandrasegaran invents ZFN to edit genomes 1994: Affymetrix introduces the first "DNA chip" (or microarray) 1995: Robert Fleischmann sequences the genome of a free-living organism, the bacterium Haemophilus Influenzae 1996: Ian Wilmut clones "Dolly" the sheep 1997: DARPA’s Microflumes program to fund research in microfluidics 1998: James Thomson and Jeffrey Jones isolate human embryonic stem cells 1999: Agilent introduces the first commercial "lab-on-a-chip" product 2002: Wilhelm Ansorge at EMBL develops the amicroarray with the whole human genome 2002: Eckard Wimmer creates the first synthetic virus 2003: Dario Campana's method to make CAR-T cells 2003: The Human Genome Project is completed  2003: The MIT establishes a Registry of Standard Biological Parts 2003: China approves a gene-therapy product, Gendicine 2004: The first international conference on Synthetic Biology is held at the MIT 2004: First commercial microarrays of the whole human genome (Affymetrix, Agilent, Applied Biosystems, Illumina, NimbleGen) 2005: The genomes of the chimpanzee and of rice are published 2005: Jay Keasling (UC Berkeley) artificially produces artemisinin acid 2005: Fyodor Urnov uses ZFN to edit human DNA 2005: Drew Endy’s “Foundations for Engineering Biology”  2007: Personal genomics (Knome, 23andMe) 2007: Shinya Yamanaka converts adult human cells into pluripotent stem cells.  2009: Jean Bennett's gene therapy restores vision in Corey Haas 2010: Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith (Maryland) reprogram a bacterium's DNA 2010: Cheap printers for living beings (OpenPCR, Cambrian Genomics) 2010: Carl June's CAR-T therapy 2011: The TALEN technique for genome editing (Dan Voytas, Adam Bogdanove)  2012: Cloud-based biotech (Transcriptic) 2012: Markus Covert (Stanford) simulates an entire living organism in software 2012: Jennifer Doudna (UC Berkeley), Emmanuelle Charpentier (Sweden) and Feng Zhang (Broad Inst) develop the CRISPR-cas9 technique for genome editing 2013: Shoukhrat Mitalipov creates human embryonic stem cells from cloned embryos 2014: the first gene-therapy treatment approved in the West, Glybera by UniQure  2014: Jef Boeke synthesizes a chromosome (in yeast) 2014: Floyd Romesberg expands life's genetic alphabet with two new bases in a living bacterium 2015: Chinese Scientists genetically modify human embryos 2015: The cost of a personal genetic test-kit is $100, down from $3 billion in 2003 2015: Cellectis cures leukaemia in Layla Richards using TALENS editing 2015: Katsuhiko Hayashi's in vitro gametogenesis  2016: David Liu’s base editing 2017: First gene therapy for cancer treatment approved in the USA 2017: Shoukhrat Mitalipov repairs a genetic mutation in human embryos that causes a heart disease  A Timeline of CRISPR
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