Developments in Biology - Essay Example

Later in 1953 Crick and Watson invented double helix model of DNA. RNA and DNA invention led to the comprehensive understanding of human behavioral characteristics and appearance. The central dogma also helped in this regard. However the field of genetic engineering made outstanding achievements. Paul Berg and co-workers created the first recombinant DNA molecule (PNAS) in 1972. In 1977, Allan Maxam and Walter Gilbert at Harvard University and Frederick Sanger at the U.K. Medical Research Council (MRC) independently develop methods for sequencing DNA.

The development of human genome project can be said to be the culmination of advances in the field of human genetics. In 1980, David Botstein, Ronald Davis, Mark Skolnick and Ray White proposed a method to map the entire human genome based on RFLPs which can be considered as the starting point of human genome project ideology. In 1984, MRC scientists decipher the complete DNA sequence of the Epstein-Barr virus, 170 kb. Later in 1985, Kary Mullis and colleagues developed PCR, a technique to replicate vast amounts of DNA.

In 1986, Leroy Hood and Lloyd Smith of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and colleagues came up with the first automated DNA sequencing machine. In 1987, Helen Donis-Keller and colleagues at Collaborative Research Inc. published the "first" genetic map with 403 markers, sparking a fight over credit and priority (Leslie Roberts, 2001). Similarly, in 1992, U.S. and French teams completed genetic maps of mouse and human and mouse followed by the publication of a complete genetic linkage map of the human genome.

One more important finding was in 1995, researchers at Whitehead published a physical map of the human genome containing 15,000 markers. Later in 1996, An international consortium publicly released the complete genome sequence of the yeast S. cerevisiae. Later Yoshihide Hayashizakis group at RIKEN completed the first set of full-length mouse