History of MicrobiologyHistory of Microbiology

1600-1699 1700-1749 1750-1799 1800-1849

1850-1859 1860-1869 1870-1879 1880-1889 1890-1899

1900-1909 1910-1919 1920-1929 1930-1939 1940-1949

1950-1959 1960-1969 1970-1979 1980-1989 1990-1999

Before 1600

Table of Contents

2000-2009

Ancient Roman Empire

Before 1600

1600150014001300120011001000A.D.

B.C.

Ancient Egyptians develop methods of

embalming

Ancient Romans develop ideas about contagious

particles. They also perform first recorded acts of

biological warfare--they dumped rotting corpses into the water supplies of their

enemies.4300 B.C. Babylonian clay tablets have beer

recipes

1348 Black Death Kills 1/3 of European population

1590 Janssen Develops compound microscope

600 A.D. Mayans make fermented beverage from

cacao (chocolate)

Ancient Egyptians

1096 Holy Roman Empire begins the Crusades

1120 First restaurant (China)

1215 King John of England signs the Magna Carta (the first set of

written, democratic laws)

1429 Joan of Arc leads the French army against British

invaders

1596 First flush toilet

Pre-1600

1600-1699

1600 1610 1620 1630 1640 1650 1660 1670 1680 1690 1700

1603 Shakespeare publishes Hamlet

1610 Galileo says the Earth revolves

around the Sun

1620 The Mayflower lands at Plymouth Rock

1666 Newton describes The

Law of Gravity

1692 Salem Witch Trials

1674 Anton von Leeuwenhoek becomes first person to view living microorganisms. This marks the beginning of Microbiology.

1665 Robert Hooke views cork through a microscope--

coins the term “cell.”

1668 Francesco Redi performs the first documented controlled scientific experiment. Covers meat with

cheese cloth, and leaves other pieces of meet uncovered. Uncovered meat, exposed to flies,

develops maggots. Covered meat does not develop maggots. Redi concludes that adult flies are

necessary for the production of maggots. This is the first major blow to the theory of spontaneous

generation.

1600

1700-1749

1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750

1735 Linnaeus develops a taxonomy and a naming system (binomial nomenclature) for organisms.

1745 John Needham shows that boiled broth that cools down overnight

becomes richly contaminated with microorganisms. He forcefully argues the microbes must be borne from the

broth. He publishes a formal presentation of the Theory of

Spontaneous Generation

1712 An early steam engine is installed at an English coal

mine. This marks the beginning of the First Industrial

Revolution.1732 Benjamin Franklin begins publication of Poor

Richards Almanac

1705 Edmund Halley uses Newtonian laws of motion to predict the return of the comet

that bears his name.1726 Bartolomeo Cristofori

develops the piano.1726 Jonathon Swift publishes Gulliver’s Travels

1718 Blackbeard the Pirate is killed.

1700

1750-1799

1750 1760 1770 1780 1790 1800

1789 Mutiny on the HMS Bounty

1752 Benjamin Franklin flies a kite in a storm to investigate the electrical

nature of lightning.

1770 Ludwig von Beethoven is born

1776 Declaration of Independence is signed

1787 U.S. Constitution is signed into law

1789 French Revolution

1756 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is born

1767 Lazzaro Spallanzani performs experiments with boiled and unboiled

gravy. He shows that boiled gravy will only spoil if exposed to air. He concludes

that spontaneous generation cannot be correct.

1798 Edward Jenner performs the first vaccinations against smallpox. He collects the pus from cowpox blisters on the hands

of milkmaids. He contaminates a lance with this pus and then cuts the skin of

children.

1750

1800-1849

1800 1810 1820 1830 1840 1850

1812 Development of the first canned foods

1818 Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein

1826 Photography is invented

1844 Samuel Morse develops the first telegraph line.

1848 Women’s suffrage movement begins in England

1848 Marx and Engels publish the Communist

Manifesto

1829 England installs first municipal water

filtration system

1840 Ignaz Semmelweis puts forth the revolutionary idea that

physicians should wash their hands when assisting in

childbirth.

1835 Agostino Bassi proves that a fungus is the cause of silkworm disease.

1800 Johnny Appleseed arrives in the Ohio River Valley

1800 Washington D.C. is established as the capital of the U.S.A.

1800

1850-1859

1850 1852 1854 1856 1858 1860

1852 Otis invents the

elevator

1854 John Snow identifies contaminated water as the

cause of a cholera epidemic in England

1859 Charles Darwin publishes the Origin of Species

1857 Louis Pasteur determines that yeast cause fermentation of wine and

develops the process of pasteurization that saves the French

wine industry. This marks the beginning of the Golden Age of

Microbiology--a period of explosive growth of knowledge of microbes

(1857-1914).

1858 Rudolf Virchow develops the formal theory that life arises only from pre-existing life (later

to be called “biogenesis”.)

1851 The first YMCA opens in Boston

1857 City of Vancouver, Washington is established

1857 U.S. Suprreme Court announces the Dred Scott decision: free (non-slave)

states do not have the authority to deprive citizens of their property (slaves)

1850

1860-1869

1862 1864 1866 18681860 1870

1865 End of the Civil War

1866 Gregor Mendel publishes a study on the inheritance of characteristics in pea plants

1861 Louis Pasteur provides the final disproof of the theory of spontaneous generation. He maintains boiled broth in a swan-necked flask, open to the air, for many days without contamination.

1867 Joseph Lister uses phenol (carbolic acid) to treat surgical

wounds. This reduced infection from surgery dramatically and served as proof that surgical

infections are caused by microorganisms.

1861 Civil War begins

1865 President Abraham Lincoln is assassinated

1869 The Transcontinental Railroad

connects East and West U.S.A

1869 Mendeleey develops the Periodic Table of

Elements

1861 Louis Pasteur, studying fermentation by yeast, coins the

terms aerobic and anaerobic.

1866 Given the discovery of microscopic organisms, Ernst Haeckel proposes a third

Kingdom of Life: The Protista.

1860

1870-1879

1872 1874 1876 18781870 1880

1876 Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone

1876 Thomas Edison invents the incandescent light bulb

1876 Robert Koch, studying the disease, anthrax, validates the Germ Theory of Disease--the idea that diseases are caused by infectious agents (not by other forces such as evil spirits). This is also the first use of the rigorous steps in pathogen identification known as

Koch’s Postulates.

1879 Neisser identifies the causative agent of gonorrhea (Neisseria gonorrhoeae).

This may be the first case where a microbe is implicated as the cause of a chronic

disease.

1871 Mrs.O’Leary’s cow knocks over a lantern and

starts the Great Chicago Fire.

1872 Yellowstone becomes the world’s first National Park.

1872 Jules Verne publishes Around the World in Eighty

Days

1879 Woolworth stores open

1870 Thomas Huxley, one of the most prominent biologists of the time, coins the terms

“biogenesis” (life from pre-existing life) and “abiogenesis” (life from nonliving materials).

He provides powerful support for Pasteur’s claim that spontaneous generation (abiogenesis)

had been disproved.

1872 Ferdinand Cohn describes the roles of bacteria in

the cycling of elements in nature.

1870

1880-1889

1882 1884 1886 18881880 1890

1882 Koch identifies Mycobacterium tuberculosis as

the causative agent of tuberculosis.

1881 Koch develops the concept of achieving pure cultures using solid media.

1882 The Hess’ working in Koch’s lab, develops agar as a solid medium.

1883 Koch identifies Vibrio cholerae as the causative agent of cholera.

1884 Escherich identifies Escherichia coli

1884 Elie Metchnikoff describes phagocytosis (ingestion of solid

materials by cells)

1887 Petri develops the petri plate for use with

soild culture media

1881 Clara Barton founds the American Red Cross

1882 Bank robber Jesse James is shot and killed

1885 Sir Francis Galton proves the individuality of fingerprints

1887 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle publishes A study in Scarlet (the

first Sherlock Holmes book)

1889 Washington becomes the 42nd state in the Union

1880 Pasteur develops a vaccine for chicken cholera. This is the first attenuated

vaccine.

1884 Hans Christian Gram develops the Gram Stain.

1884 Koch formalizes Koch’s Postulates--the set of steps required to

identify the causative agent of a disease.

1885 Pasteur develops a vaccine for rabies.

1880

1890-1899

1892 1894 1896 1898 19001890

1895 Roentgen discovers X-rays

1896 Chop suey is invented in New York City

1897 Bram Stoker publishes Dracula

1890 von Behring and Kitasato develop a process for producing

diphtheria antitoxin. This is the first directed approach to therapy of

infectious disease.

1890 Sergei Winogradsky performs the definitive work on the microorganisms responsible for nitrification in nature.

1891 Paul Ehrlich proposes that antibodies are

responsible for immunity.

1892 Welch and Nuttall identify Clostridium perfringens as the causative agent of gangrene.

1892 Ivanowski launches the field of virology when he discovers the existence of the filterability of an

“invisible” (not seen through a microscope) pathogenic agent.

1899 The Society of American Bacteriologists (later renamed the American Society of

Microbiologists) is organized. This is the oldest scientific society in America.

1899 Ross describes the life cycle of the malaria

parasite.

1897 Buchner discovers that fermentation can be accomplished with a cell-free yeast extract. This launches the field of enzymology.

1890

1900-1909

1902 1904 1906 1908 19101900

1900 Sigmund Freud publishes The Interpretation of Dreams

1901 Marconi develops the wireless radio

1903 Orville and Wilbur Wright fly the first airplane

1905 Albert Einstein publishes the Theory of Relativity (E = mc2)

1906 Kellogg’s Corn Flakes is introduced

1907 Leo Baekeland develops plastic

1908 Henry Ford develops the automobile assembly line.

1900 Walter Reed and colleagues show that a virus, transmitted by

mosquitoes, causes Yellow Fever. This is the first human disease for

which a virus is implicated.

1901 Wildiers discovers that a water-soluble extract of yeast is needed for the growth of yeast.

This is the first evidence of an essential growth factor (later found to be a B vitamin). This

discovery launches the filed of vitamin research.

1904 Koning suggests that fungi play important roles in the

decomposition of organic matter and the formation of humus (topsoil).

1905 Ishiwata discovers that silkworm disease is caused by

the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (now an important insecticide).

1905 Schaudinn and Hoffman identify

Treponema pallidum as the causative agent of

syphilis.

1906 Sohngen shows that bacteria can use methane as an energy

and carbon source.

1907 Smith and Townsend discover that

the bacterium, Agrobacterium, is

responsible for the plant tumor disease called crown

gall.

1909 Ricketts shows that Rocky Mountain spotted fever is caused

by Rickettsia, an organisms intermediate in size between

viruses and bacteria. Ricketts later dies of typhus, another rickettsial

disease.

1900

1910-1919

1912 1914 1916 1918 19201910

1912 The Titanic sinks on its maiden voyage

1914 The Panama Canal is completed. It connects the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans

1914 World War I begins

1917 The Russian Revolution ends the reign of Czars and

begins the Communist regime.

1918 World War I ends

1919 The 18th Amendment to the

Constitution begins the Prohibition of alcoholic

beverages.

1918 Worldwide influenza epidemic kills more than 20 million people.1910 Nicolle shows that typhus fever is transmitted

from person to person by body lice. This information is used to reduce incideence of typhus

in both world wars.

1911 Rous discovers that a virus causes cancer in chickens. This is the first evidence that an

infectious agent can cause animal cancer.

1912 Paul Ehrlich announces the discovery of an effective cure

(Salvarsan) for syphilis. This is the first specific chemotherapeutic

agent.

1919 Blood agar is used for the first time.

Hemolytic ability is used to separate three types of Streptococcus

species.

1915 McCrady develops the fecal coliform test as a method for bacteriological analysis of

water quality.

1910

1920-1929

1922 1924 1926 1928 19301920

1920 The 19th Amendment to the Constitution guarantees women the right to vote.

1925 The Scopes Monkey Trial focuses public attention on the teaching of evolution

in public schools.

1928 Mickey Mouse is born1927 Charles Lindbergh becomes the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

1928 The first television broadcast

1929 The stock market crashes initiating the

Great Depression

1923 D.H. Bergey publishes the first definitive manual on the

characterization and classification of bacteria.

1928 Frederick Griffith discovers Transformation in bacteria. This is the founding event in the field of

Molecular Genetics. His discovery leads to the eventual understanding that DNA is the genetic material.

1929 Alexander Fleming discovers the first antibiotic, penicillin. Fleming makes this discovery by accident. He is searching for

antimicrobial chemicals and uses Staphylococcus cultures to test these chemicals. He leaves some of these bacterial cultures on the lab bench

when he goes on vacation. Upon returning, he sees that some of his cultures are contaminated with a fungus called Penicillium. He notices

that there are no bacteria growing near Penicillium.

1920

1930-1939

1932 1934 1936 1938 19401930

1931 The Empire State Building opens

1933 The 21st Amendment to the Constitution ends Prohibition

1933 Adolf Hitler ascends to power in the Nazi Party in

Germany 1935 Social Security is established

1937 The Hindenburg explodes over New Jersey

1939 The movies, Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz are released

1934 The electron microscope is invented.

1935 Domagk discovers the antimetabolic antibiotic, Prontosil,

as a treatment against Streptococcus.

1938 Theiler produces a successful vaccine against yellow

fever.

1931 van Niel shows that some photosynthetic bacteria use reduced compounds, for example H2S, as a source of electrons. He posits that

plants use H2O as an electron source. He also begins the first General Microbiology course.

1930

1940-1949

1942 1944 1946 1948 19501940

1941 Pearl Harbor is bombed drawing the Unitedd States into World War II

1942 Japanese-Americans are relocated to internment camps.

1944 D-Day: the invasion of Normandy by Allied forces.

1945 U.S.A. drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and

Nagasaki ending World War II1945 President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies

1947 Jackie Robinson becomes the first black player in Major League Baseball.

1940 Florey and Chain produce an extract of penicillin. Along with Fleming, they win

the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology.

1940 Chain and Abraham describe a substance, produced by E. coli, that inactivates

penicillin. This is the first evidence that antibiotic-resistant bacteria can develop.

1941 Beadle and Tatum publish studies on the relationship between genes and enzymes.

This leads to the understanding that genes encode enzymes (more generally, proteins).

1942 The term “antibiotic” comes into existence.

1944 Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty show that Griffith’s (1928) transforming factor is DNA. This discovery causes most biologists to accept that DNA is the genetic material.

1946 Lederberg and Tatum show that bacteria can reproduce

sexually (conjugation). Thus, bacteria can exchange genes.

1947 Selman Waksman publishes a comprehensive definition of the word

antibiotic: “a chemical substance produced by microbes that inhibits the growth of and

even destroys other microbes.”

1940

1950-1959

1952 1954 1956 1958 19601950

1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy begins an anti-communist campaign that ruins

the lives and careers of dozens of American citizens.

1950 Korean War begins

1954 Racial segregation in schools is declared unconstitutional.

1955 The first McDonalds opens

1955 Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man. This is a defining moment in the Civil Rights Movement.

1959 Fidel Castro rises to power in Cuba.

1959 Alaska and Hawaii become the 49th and 50th States.

1953 James Watson and Francis Crick develop the three-dimensional model of DNA structure. This

molecular structure immediately causes biologists to understand that DNA is the genetic material. The publication of these results ignites an explosion in growth of knowledge and application of genetic

principles.

1958 Matthew Meselson and Frank Stahl show the semi-conservative nature of DNA

replication.

1959 Finland, Jones, and Barnes comment on the potential for antibiotic

resistance.

1953 Jonas Salk begins preliminary testing of a polio vaccine.

1952 Lederberg and Lederberg develop the method of replica

plating.

1950

1960-1969

1962 1964 1966 1968 19701960

1961 Russian cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, becomes the first

human in space.

1962 Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring

1963 President John F. Kennedy is assassinated

1968 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated

1969 Neil Armstrong becomes the first human to walk on the

moon.

1965 The Beatles hold the Top Five spots on the rock and roll top forty.

1968 Prokaryotae, proposed by Murray, is accepted as

fourth Kingdom.

1969 Robert Whittaker proposes the five-kingdom system with the addition of

the Kingdom Fungi.

1961 Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod develop the lac operon model.

This is the first determination of a mechanism by which an environmental

cue turns on/off a gene.

1964 Epstein, Achong, and Barr show that a virus (EBV) can cause cancer in humans.

1965 Linus Pauling suggests that DNA can be used to understand evolutionary relationships and to

identify microorganisms.

1961 Nirenberg and Matthaei synthesizea poly-U RNA. They

find this RNA directs the synthesis of a protein containing

only phenylalanine. They conclude that UUU encodes

phenylalanine. This is the start of the efforts to decipher the

genetic code.

1960

1970-1979

1972 1974 1976 1978 19801970

1970 Four students are killed during an anti-war protest at Kent State University.

1971 The 21st Amendment to the Constitution lowers the voting age to

18 years old.

1973 U.S. troop evacuation of Vietnam ends in the fall of Saigon

1974 Richard Nixon resigns the Presidency in the wake of

the Watergate Scandal.

1976 The United States celebrates its bicentennial.

1977 Star Wars is released.

1979 Professor Kibota obtains his

drivers license.

1978 Jessica Louise Brown, the world’s first test tube

baby is born.

1978 Using genetic analysis of ribosomal RNAs, Woese discovers

unusual procaryotes called Archaea (or Archaeobacteria). He finds these

organisms to be so genetically distinct (compared to other procaryotes and to the eucaryotes) that he suggests a new taxonomic grouping above Kingdom,

The Domain.

1971 Nathans, Smith, and Arber discover restriction enzymes. This discovery sets off the age of genetic

engineering.

1973 Berg, Boyer, and Cohen produce the first genetically-

engineered organisms.

1975 The Asilomar Conference gathers the top geneticists to

discuss the ethics of the developing technologies of

genetic engineering.

1979 Smalllpox is declared officially

eliminated.

1977 Bishop and Varmus discover retroviral oncogenes

(cancer-causing genes)

1976 The Pet Rock

1977 Sanger develops a method for determining the nucleotide

sequence of DNA

1970

1980-1989

1982 1984 1986 1988 19901980

1980 Mount Saint Helens erupts.

1980 John Lennon is shot and killed.

1986 The space shuttle, Challenger, explodes after lift-off.

1989 The Berlin Wall is torn down.

1983 The internet is established.

1983 Montaigner and Gallo identifies the Human Immunodeficiency Virus as the

cause of AIDS.

1981 Margulis formalizes the Endosymbiotic Theory of

Organelle Evolution.

1988 Kary Mullis develops the method of DNA amplification called Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR).

1986 Beachy and Fraley show that when plants are transformed with the gene of a coat protein of tobacco mosaic virus, the plants

become resistant to the virus. This opens the new field of plant

immuno-genetics.

1984 Marshall demonstrates that a bacterium, Helicobacter

pylori, causes peptic ulcers.

1982 Prusiner discovers a new type of infectious agent--an infectious protein

called a prion--that is responsible for the sheep disease, scrapie.

1980 The Cabbage Patch craze.

1984 Geraldine Ferraro becomes the first female

Vice Presidential candidate.

1980

1990-1999

1992 1994 1996 1998 20001990

1990 The invasion of Kuwait by Iraq leads the U.S.A. into

the Persian Gulf War. 1994 O.J. Simpson is arrested for the murders of

Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.

1995 The Federal Building in Oklahoma City is bombed.

1999 The U.S. Senate holds impeachment hearings against

President Bill Clinton.

1996 Scottish scientists produce a cloned sheep they name Dolly.

1996 Kibota and Lynch estimate the E. coli genomic rate of deleterious mutations at

about 1 in 10,000 cell divisions. This leads the world’s biologists to re-think the meaning

of life.

1993 W. French Anderson leads first successful gene therapy.

1994 Cano cultures bacteria from endospores in

40 million year old material.

1996 NASA scientists find bacteria-like

fossils in rocks from Mars.

1998 Giovanoni finds a gene from an unknown organism in sea water. Upon

further searching, this unknown organism is ubiquitous and may be the most abundant

organism on Earth.

1995 Venter and colleagues elucidate the first complete genome

sequence--Haemophilus influenza.

1993 Schopf demonstrates that cyanobacteria-like

organisms had evolved 3.46 billion years ago.

1992 Riots break out in Los Angeles after a not guilty

verdict in the trial of police officers charged in the

beating of Rodney King.

1990

1999 Schulz identifies largest bacterium Thiomargarita.

2000-2010

2002 2004 2006 2008 20102000

2000

2000 Al Gore wins the popular vote but George W. Bush wins in the electoral college to become President of the United States.

September 11, 2001 Terrorists hijack airplanes and crash into the World Trade Center buildings, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania.

2002 The U.S. goes to war in Afghanistan and subsequently in Iraq.

2003 After 10 years of work, the first phase of The Human Genome Project--the sequencing of the entire human genome--is completed.

2003 A new, mysterious respiratory disease (SARS) that kills healthy young adults becomes epidemic.

2003 Krispy Kreme comes to Portland-Vancouver

2000 Artnzen and colleagues develop the first edible vaccine--a genetically-modified potato containing part of the Norwalk virus.