Human Accomplishments – Biology

Central Events in Biology

Murray, C.A. (2003) Human accomplishment the pursuit of excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950. HarperCollins Publishers.
Year	Country	Event
500 BCE	Greece	Alcmaeon conducts dissections on animals, and perhaps on a human cadaver, for scientific purposes.
350 BCE	Greece	Aristotle creates a classification system for animals and plants, founding biological taxonomy.
320 BCE	Greece	Theophrastus’s Enquiry into Plants and Causes of Plants founds botany.
310 BCE	Greece	Praxagoras discovers the difference between veins and arteries.
280 BCE	Alexandria	Herophilus’s improvements in dissection and vivisection produce more detailed knowledge of the functions of internal organs, nerves, and the brain, founding scientific anatomy.
77	Italy	The 37 volumes of Pliny the Elders Historia Naturalis summarizes the natural world as seen by the ancients.
180	Greece	Galen dissects animals, demonstrating a variety of physiological processes and founding experimental physiology.
1543	Italy	Andreas Vesalius writes De Htimani Corporis Fabrica, a more scientifically exact anatomy text based on dissection that supplants Galen.
1553	Italy	Early attempts to describe blood circulation culminate in Realdo Colombo’s discovery that blood passes from the lung into the pulmonary vein.
1555	France	Pierre Belon identifies similarities in skeletons across animals (homologies), specifically birds and humans.
1583	Italy	Andrea Cesalpino’s De Plantis, the first scientific textbook on theoretical botany, introduces a major early system of plant classification.
1628	England	William Harvey’s Exercitatio Attatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus describes the heart as a pump and accurately describes the nature of blood circulation.
1653	Sweden	Olof Rudbeck discovers the lymphatic system, demonstrating its existence in a dog.
1658	Netherlands	Jan Swammerdam discovers red corpuscles.
1660	Italy	Marcello Malpighi discovers capillaries linking the arterial and venous circulation in the lungs.
1665	England	Robert Hooke’s Micrographia includes the first description of cells and coins the term cell.
1669	England	Richard Lower describes the structure of the heart and its muscular properties, along with the observation that blood changes color in the lungs.
1676	Netherlands	Antoni van Leeuwenhoek discovers microorganisms.
1677	Netherlands	Antoni van Leeuwenhoek confirms the existence of sperm and speculates that they are the source of reproduction.
1682	England	Nehemiah Grew s Anatomy of Plants includes the discovery and description of plant sexuality.
1683	Netherlands	Antoni van Leeuwenhoek discovers bacteria.
1686	England	John Ray’s Historia Plantarnm presents the first modern plant classification and introduces the idea of species as a unit of taxonomy.
1727	England	Stephen Hales’s Vegetable Statics describes the nature of sap flow and plant nourishment.
1733	England	Stephen Hales’s Haemastaticks describes the first quantitative estimate of blood pressure and fundamental characteristics of blood circulation.
1735	Sweden	Carolus Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae uses systematic principles for defining the genera and species of organisms. A later edition (1749) develops binomial nomenclature for classifying plants and animals.
1779	Netherlands	Jan Ingenhousz describes photosynthesis.
1800	Germany, France	Karl Burdach, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, and Gottfried Treviranus introduce the term biology.
1801	France	Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck’s Systeme des Animaux sans Vertebres founds modern invertebrate zoology.
1809	France	Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck’s Philosophic Zoologiqne includes a clear statement of organic evolution but wrongly theorizes that acquired traits can be inherited.
1818	France	Marie Bichat’s Traite des Membranes en General founds histology.
1827	Germany	Karl von Baer discovers the mammalian ovum.
1828	Germany	Karl von Baer’s Uber die Entwickelungsgeschichte derThiere founds modern comparative embryology.
1831	Scotland	Robert Brown discovers that the cell nucleus is a general feature of all plant cells.
1837	France	Rene Dutrochet demonstrates that photosynthesis requires chlorophyll.
1838	Germany	Theodor Schwann’s Mikroskopische Untersuchungen and Hubert Schleiden’s Beitroge zur Phytogenesis argue that cells are the fundamental organic units and develop in the same basic way, founding modern cell theory.
1858	Germany	Rudolph Virchow’s Die Cellularpathologie founds cellular pathology.
1859	England	Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species introduces the theory of evolution through the mechanism of natural selection, independently developed by Alfred Wallace.
1861	France	Pierre-Paul Broca introduces the theory of localization of the brain’s speech center, with differing hemispheres containing the center for right- and left-handed individuals.
1865	Germany	Julius von Sachs discovers that chlorophyll is the key compound that turns carbon dioxide and water into starch while releasing water.
1866	Austria	Johann Mendel’s “Experiments in Plant Hybridization,” founds the study of genetics, though the paper goes unnoticed for decades.
1869	England	Francis Gabon’s Hereditary Genius applies Darwin’s theory of evolution to man’s mental inheritance, arguing that individual talents are genetically transmitted.
1882	Germany	Walther Flemming delineates the sequence of nuclear division, mitosis.
1883	England	Francis Galton introduces eugenics as a theory and a term.
1884	Germany	Hans Gram introduces bacterial staining, later an important tool in developing anti-bacterial agents.
1889	Spain, Italy	Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramon y Cajal describe the cellular structure of the brain and spinal cord, validating neuron theory.
1892	Netherlands, Russia	Martinus Beijerinck and Dmitri Ivanovsky discover that a filtrable virus is the causative agent of tobacco mosaic infection, the first identification of a virus.
1900	Austria	Karl Landsteiner discovers blood types.
1900	Germany, Austria, Netherlands	Karl Correns, Erich Tschermak, and Hugo deVries independently rediscover patterns of heredity found by Mendel and apply them to Darwin’s theory of evolution.
1901	Netherlands	Hugo deVries’s Mutation Theory applies mutations to evolution (and acknowledges Mendels priority).
1902	England	William Bayliss and Ernest Starling discover secretin, the first hormone, and its role as a chemical messenger.
1907	USA	Ross Harrison achieves the first tissue culture, demonstrating the development of nerve fibers from neural tissue.
1909	Denmark	Wilhelm Johannsen introduces the word gene for the unit of inheritance and distinguishes between genotype and phenotype, backed with experimental evidence.
1910	USA	Thomas Morgan discovers sex-linked characteristics.
1911	USA	Thomas Morgan and Alfred Sturtevant prepare the first chromosome map, showing five sex-linked genes in the fruit fly.
1915	England, France	Felix d'Herelle and Frederick Twort independently discover bacteriophages.
1915	USA	Thomas Morgan, Alfred Sturtevant, Hermann Muller, and Calvin Bridges propose that chromosomes contain genes that determine heredity.
1926	USA	Thomas Morgan discovers that mutant characteristics in fruit flies are connected to paired Mendelian genes, which are joined to chromosomes.
1927	USA	Hermann Muller discovers that X-rays produce mutations.
1929	Germany	Johannes Berger invents electroencephalography, measuring brain waves in humans and opening up the study of neurophysiology.
1935	USA	Wendell Stanley crystallizes the tobacco mosaic virus, demonstrating that crystallization is not a dividing line between life and non-life.
1937	England	Hans Krebs discovers the Krebs Cycle of citric acids and its role in metabolism.
1944	England	Dorothy Hodgkin, Barbara Low, and C. W. Bunn discover the structure of penicillin.
1944	USA	Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty discover that DNA is the genetic material in cells.
1948	USA	John Enders, Frederick Robbins, and Thomas Weller develop a method to culture viruses.

A culture that no longer recognizes achievement or thinks in terms of greatness is on course to spiral down into stagnation and senescence.