- 1917 Karl Ereky coined the term ‘Biotechnology’
- 1944 Avery, MacLeod and McCarty demonstrated that ‘DNA is the genetic material’
- 1952 Joshua Lederberg Discovered ‘Plasmids’
- 1953 Watson and Crick proposed ‘Double Helical structure of DNA’
- 1960s Werner Arber, Matthew Meselson discovered ‘Type I restriction enzymes’
- 1967 Gellert, Lehman, Richardson and Hurwitz discovered ‘ligases enzymes’
- 1970 Hamilton O. Smith and Thomas J. Kelly discovered ‘ Type II restriction enzymes’
- 1972 Paul Berg assembled the first ‘Recombinant DNA’ from a bacterium into the virus
- 1973 Stanley N. Cohen and Herbert Boyer developed ‘DNA cloning and rDNA technology’
- 1975 Georges J.F. Köhler and César Milstein described the ‘Hybridoma Technique’ for production of monoclonal antibodies.
- 1982 FDA approved world’s first recombinant DNA Therapeutic Product ‘Humulin’ developed by Eli Lilly and Genentech
- 1983 Kary Mullis developed ‘Polymerase Chain Reaction’
- 1984 Sir Alec Jeffreys invented ‘DNA Fingerprinting’
- 1986 The first recombinant vaccine ‘Recombivax HB’ for Hepatitis B was approved for human use
- 1990 ‘Human Genome Project’ officially initiated which was coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Institute of Health (NIH)
- 1994 The first genetically engineered crop ‘Flavr Savr’ tomato was introduced which was produced by Calgene in 1992
- 1996 Keith Campbell and Ian Wilmut cloned the first mammal from adult somatic cell using nuclear transfer ‘Dolly’ (Sheep)
- 1996 Researchers at Monsanto developed ‘Bt cotton’ and first commercially released it in China and the United States in 1996, followed by its introduction in India in 2003
- 2000 Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer developed ‘Golden Rice’
- 2003 The Human Genome Project (HGP) was completed
- 2004 ‘Avastin’, an anti-VEGF monoclonal antibody for cancer treatment was discovered
- 2006 A recombinant vaccine ‘Gardasil’ against human papillomavirus (HPV) receives FDA approval
- 2006 Discovery of RNA interference ‘Gene Silencing’ by double stranded RNA
- 2010 Robert Edwards awarded Nobel Prize for the development of human ‘in vitro fertilization’ (IVF) therapy
- 2012 Shinya Yamanaka and John B. Gurdon discovered that mature differentiated cells can be reprogrammed into ‘Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells’
- 2019 Recent advances in the ‘CRISPR-Cas9’ genome editing tool
- 2020 Recombinant vaccines against COVID-19 was developed