Timeline of biotechnology

Notable events in the history of biotechnology:

* before 8000 BC – Collecting of seeds for replanting. Evidence that Mesopotamian people used selective breeding (artificial selection) practices to improve livestock.
* around 7000 BC – Brewing beer, fermenting wine, baking bread with help of yeast.
* 8000 BC - 3000 BC – Yogurt and cheese made with lactic-acid-producing bacteria by various cultures.
* 1590 – The microscope is invented by Zacharias Janssen.
* 1675 – Microorganisms discovered by Anton van Leeuwenhoek.
* 1856 – Gregor Mendel discovered the laws of inheritance.
* 1862 – Louis Pasteur discovered the bacterial origin of fermentation.
* 1919 – Karl Ereky, a Hungarian agricultural engineer, first used the word biotechnology.
* 1928 – Alexander Fleming noticed that a certain mould could stop the duplication of bacteria, leading to the first antibiotic: penicillin.
* 1953 – James D. Watson and Francis Crick describe the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, called DNA for short.
* 1972 – The DNA composition of chimpanzees and gorillas is discovered to be 99% similar to that of humans.
* 1975 – Method for producing monoclonal antibody developed by Kohler and Milstein.
* 1980 –
**Modern biotech is characterized by recombinant DNA technology. The prokaryote model, "E. coli", is used to produce synthetic insulin and other medicine, in human form. (It is estimated that only 5% of diabetics were allergic to animal insulins available before, while new evidence suggests that type 1 diabetes mellitus is "caused" by an allergy to human insulin).
** A viable brewing yeast strain, "Saccharomyces cerevisiae" 1026, acts as a modifier of the microflora in the rumen of cows and digestive tract of horses).
** The United States Supreme Court, in 447 U.S. 303 (1980), rules in favor of microbiologist Ananda Chakrabarty in the case of a USPTO request for a first patent granted to a genetically modified living organism (GMO) in history.
* 1984 – Nutrigenomics as applied science in animal nutrition.
* 1994 – U.S. FDA approves of the first GM food: the "Flavr Savr" tomato.
* 1997 – British scientists, led by Ian Wilmut, from the Roslin Institute report cloning a sheep called Dolly the sheep using DNA from two adult sheep cells.
* 2000 – Completion of a, "rough draft," of the human genome in the Human Genome Project.
* 2002 – Researchers sequence the DNA of rice, the main food source for two-thirds of the world's population. Rice is the first crop to have its genome decoded.
* 2003 – GloFish, the first biotech pet, hits the North American market. Specially bred to detect water pollutants, the fish glows red under black light thanks to the addition of a natural bioluminescence gene.
* 2004 –
** November – Korean researchers treat spinal cord injury by transplanting multipotent adult stem cells from an umbilical cord blood.
** December – A team of researchers at the University of Paris develops a method to produce large number of red blood cells from hematopoietic stem cells, creating an environment that mimics the conditions of bone marrow.
* 2005 –
** January – Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison differentiate human blastocyst stem cells into neural stem cells, and finally into spinal motor neuron cells.