Milestones in Microbiology

Other landmarks and discoveries in the field of microbiology are summarized in Table 1.

Table 1. Synopsis of some milestones in microbiology

Event	Discoverer	Date
Discovery of Petri dish (plate)	Richard Petri	1887
Discovery of nutrient agar (agar-agar)	Fanny A. Eilshemius & Dr. Walter Hesse	1881
Release of first edition of Bargey’s Manual	Professor David Bergey	1923
Discovery of Archaea using rRNA analysis	Carl Woese & George Fox	1977
Discovery of bacterial conjugation	Edward Tatum & Joshua Lederberg	1946
Discovery of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)	Luc Montagnier	1983
Discovery of transposable elements	Barbara McClintock	1951
Discovery of immunoglobulin structure	Rodney Porter	1959
First discovery of yellow fever virus	Walter Reed	1900
Discovery of monoclonal antibodies	Georges Kohler & Cesar Milstein	1975
Discovery of sulfanilamide & sulpha drugs	Gerhard Domagk	1935
Proposed germ theory of disease	Friedrich Henle	1840
Discovery of the ribosomes as sites of protein synthesis	Sydney Brenne, Francois Jacob and Matthew Meselson	1961
Discovery of streptomycin	Selman Waksman & Albert Schatz	1943
Discovery of bacteriophages	Frederick Twort	1915
First cultivation of viruses in cell culture	John Enders	1946
Discovery of diphtheria antitoxin	Emil von Behring & Shibasaburo Kitasato	1890
Discovery of plasmid DNA	Stanley Cohen, Annie Chang, Robert Helling and Herbert Boyer	1973
First discovery of zoonoses (Babesiosis)	Theobald Smith and F.L. Kilbourne	1893
Discovery of human blood groups	Karl Landsteiner	1901
Crystallization of tobacco mosaic virus (TMV)	Wendell Stanley	1935
Discovery of first cancer virus	Francis Rous	1911
Discovery of lac operon	Francois Jacob, David Perrin, Carmen Sanchez and Jacques Monod	1960
Discovery of polymerase chain reaction (PCR)	Kary Mullis	1985
Discovery of Taq polymerase	Thomas Brock & Hudson Freeze	1969
Discovery of the genetic code	Marshall Nirenberg & Gobind H. Khorana	1966
Discovery of restriction enzymes or endonucleases	Hamilton Smith & David Nathans	1970
Discovery of DNA sequencing	Fred Sanger, Steven Niklen & Alan Coulson	1977
Discovery of clonal selection theory	Macfarlane F. Burnet	1959
Discovery of reverse transcriptase	Howard Temin, David Baltimore & Renato Dulbeccco	1969
Discovery of prions	Stanley Prusiner	1981
Discovery of bacterial transduction	Joshua Lederberg & Norton Zinder	1952

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