A Timeline of Genetics Research at Cornell University

Compiled by Susan Lang

 

 

Date
Cornell events
World events
1865
 Cornell is established and becomes the Land Grant university of New York. 
1866
 Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel publishes his findings on laws of inheritance in garden peas.
1888
 Liberty Hyde Bailey is recruited to Cornell as professor of horticulture. He later wills to Cornell his collection of papers, including a copy of Mendel's original paper. 
1899
  International Congress on Plant Hybridization is held in London as Mendelian principles gain rapid acceptance.
1902
  William Bateson coins the term "genetics." Words such as gene, homozygote, heterozygote, allelomorph, phenotype and genotype enter the scientific vocabulary.
1904
 New York State College of Agriculture is established at Cornell. 
1907
 Herbert J. Webber becomes first tenure-track faculty member in the College of Agriculture. In 1908, the Laboratory of Plant Breeding is established with 13 graduate students and $600 for research. 
1909
 Harry H. Love lays the roots of biometry. 
1914
 Rollins A. Emerson, who provided evidence that characeristics like yield, vigor and quality are controlled by specific genes, becomes head of Cornell department of plant breeding. 
1915
  The Mechanism of Mendelian Heridity, an epochal book, is authored by T. H. Morgan and others.
1921
 Barbara McClintock, a Cornell sophomore destined to become a Nobel laureate, attends the only undergraduate genetics course at Cornell. Emerson shows in a seminal paper that it takes more than one gene to control certain characteristics. 
1923
 Helen Ziegler Trajkovick is first woman to receive a master's degree in plant breeding from Cornell 
1927
 George W. Beadle works on Mendellian asynapsis in Zea mays. for his doctoral thesis. He gets his Ph.D in 1931 
1928
 Marcus Rhoades begins doctoral work; with Beadle, he explores the relation between chromosomes and genes. Emerson establishes Maize Genetics Corporation, which Rhoades will coordinate. 
1929
 McClintock and colleagues, including Chares R. Brunham, complete studies aimed at association each of the 10 chormosomes comprising the maize complement with the genes each carries. They make remarkable advances in maize cytogenetics (study of the chromosomes and their genetic content and expressions). 
1930s
 Emerson releases selectively bred varieties of dried beans, celery and muskmelon. 
1930s
  Emerson's former student Beadle works on crossing over in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster at the California Institute of Technology.
1932
 Emerson hosts the Sixth International Congress of Genetics at Cornell. In what is now the Emeerson Gardin in Cornell Plantations, a 10-row corn demonstration "living linkage map" garden shows traits of each gene on the 10 chromosomes. 
1935
  Beadle and colleagues work out the biochemical genetics of eye pigment synbthesis in the fruit fly Drosophila and the moth Ephestia.
1935
 Cornell team publishes the 10 linkages maps of corn chromosomes. 
1942-45
  U.S. enters World War II and progress in genetics slows.
1940s
 Plant breeders Henry Munger, Neal Jensen and Royse Murphy and Emerson begin releasing new and improved strains of field and vegetable crops. G. W. Salisbury pioneers research in artificial breeding of animals. In 1947, M. Rosalind Morris and Leona O. Schnell become the first women at Cornell to receive Ph.Ds in plant breeding. 
1946
 James B. Sumner, professor of biochemistry and nutrition, wins the 1946 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for showing that enzymes are proteins. 
1953
  James Watson and Francis Crick propose the DNA model with two helically intertwined chains tied together by hydrogen bonds.
1950s
 Geneticist Adrian Srb, a student of Beadle's, introduces biochemical genetics to Cornell. He works out the genetic control of biochemical pathways in bread mold (Neurspora).
Srb and geneticist Ray Owen publish General Genetics, which will become a famous basic text.		 
1950s
 Cornell biometricists W.T. Federer and D.S. Robson advance experimental designs and statistical analyses for population genetics and evolution and other areas of biology. Agricultural economist A. Batton and animal scientist R. Foote conduct pioneering work that boosts bull semen preservation and fertility. 
1954
 Animal scientist C. R. Henderson revolutionizes dairy cattle breeding with new techniques, and launches New York as world leader in applied genetics through artifical insemination for animal breeding, particularly dairy cattle. 
1958
  Beadle co-wins Nobel Prize in Physioloqy for his one geneone enzyme work with the bread mold Neurospora that began at Cornell 30 years earlier.
1958
 Geneticist Margaret Emmerling is first woman to join Cornell genetics/plant breeding faculty. Geneticist Bruce Wallace introduces population and evolutionary genetics to Cornell, studying the effects of radiation on populations and evoutionary genetics using Drosophila. 
1962
  Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins share a Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work in elucidating the structure of DNA.
1960s
 Henderson develops new methods of predicting an animals's genetic ability. His Best Linear Unbiased Prediction becomes known worldwide as the way to evaluate animals genetically. 
1968
  R. W. Holley, Cornell Ph.D '47 and former Cornell professor of biochemistry, wins Nobel Prize in Medicine for characterizing alanine transfer RNA, which is important in molecular genetics.
1968
 Genetics research moves from plant breeding to the newly established Division of Biological Sciences, which includes the Section of Genetics, Development and Physiology, headed by geneticist Robert A. Morison. 
1970s
 Adrian Srb shows that mitochondrial systems have substantial autonomy in reference to chromosomal influence.
Other Cornell research includes work in mutation, recombination and genetic transformation in yeast; ecological genetics; establishing Tetrahymena as a useful organism for genetic research and for exploring the potential of the ciliate as a model developmental system; plasmid genetics; and | using interspecific hybrids of Xenopus to study the expression of nucleolar and various enzyme patterns.		 
1975
  David Baltimore, Renato Dulbecco and Howard Temin share the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discoveries concerning the interaction between tumor viruses and the genetic material of the cell.
1980s
 The gene gun and the Biolistics process are invented by plant scientist John Sanford, working with engineer Edward D. Wolf and machinist Nelson Allen, to shoot DNA into plant and animal cells.
In other research, Cornell-developed methods for preserving bull semen are used in artificial breeding for 80 percent of the world' s dairy cows. Other studies range through bacterial genetics and the isolation of appropriate transducing phages; molecular genetics and the regulation of mitochondrial genes; and the use of mutants in analyzing critical cytoplasmic steps in the very early development of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans.		 
1983
  McClintock, who left Cornell in 1936, becomes the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her work on transposable elements in maize (and later found in other organisms) that she started at Cornell.
1990s
 Steven Tanksley, Cornell L. H. Bailey Professor of Plant Breeding, becomes the first to use map-based cloning in crop plants, successfully locating and transferring disease-resistance genes to tomatoes (1993). Other Cornell researchers look at molecular population genetics, mammalian developmental genetics and insertional mutagenesis in mice; genetic molecular biology genomics and molecular markers; molecular biology in agriculture and medicine; transqenic cloning; culturing and tranferring embryos; producing embryos following in vitro fertilization.
Computer theory becomes an increasingly important area of genetics research. Cornell enters a new era of nanotechnoloqy research into biochips to sequence DNA and supercomputer-based programs to pinpoint genomic landmarks.		 
1995
  Edward B. Lewis, Christiane Nüslein-Volhard and Eric F. Wieschaus share a Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discoveries concerning the genetic control of early embryonic development.