---
title: "Timeline of scientific discoveries"
chunk: 7/7
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_scientific_discoveries"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:28:31.534973+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== 1950–1999 ==
1951: George Otto Gey propagates first cancer cell line, HeLa
1952: Jonas Salk: developed and tested first polio vaccine
1952: Stanley Miller: demonstrated that the building blocks of life could arise from primeval soup in the conditions present during early Earth (Miller-Urey experiment)
1952: Frederick Sanger: demonstrated that proteins are sequences of amino acids
1953: James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin: helical structure of DNA, basis for molecular biology
1957: Chien Shiung Wu: demonstrated that parity, and thus charge conjugation and time-reversals, are violated for weak interactions
1962: Riccardo Giacconi and his team discover the first cosmic x-ray source, Scorpius X-1
1963: Lawrence Morley, Fred Vine, and Drummond Matthews:  Paleomagnetic stripes in ocean crust as evidence of plate tectonics (Vine–Matthews–Morley hypothesis).
1964: Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig: postulates quarks, leading to the Standard Model
1964: Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson: detection of CMBR providing experimental evidence for the Big Bang
1965: Leonard Hayflick: normal cells divide only a certain number of times: the Hayflick limit
1967: Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish discover first pulsar
1967: Vela nuclear test detection satellites discover the first gamma-ray burst
1970: James H. Ellis proposed the possibility of "non-secret encryption", more commonly termed public-key cryptography, a concept that would be implemented by his GCHQ colleague Clifford Cocks in 1973, in what would become known as the RSA algorithm, with key exchange added by a third colleague Malcolm J. Williamson, in 1975.
1971: Place cells in the brain are discovered by John O'Keefe
1974: Russell Alan Hulse and Joseph Hooton Taylor, Jr. discover indirect evidence for gravitational wave radiation in the Hulse–Taylor binary
1977: Frederick Sanger sequences the first DNA genome of an organism using Sanger sequencing
1980: Klaus von Klitzing discovered the quantum Hall effect
1982: Donald C. Backer et al. discover the first millisecond pulsar
1983: Kary Mullis invents the polymerase chain reaction, a key discovery in molecular biology
1986: Karl Müller and Johannes Bednorz: Discovery of High-temperature superconductivity
1988:  Bart van Wees and colleagues at TU Delft and Philips Research discovered the quantized conductance in a two-dimensional electron gas.
1990: Mary-Claire King discovers the link between heritable breast cancers and a gene found on chromosome 17q21.
1992: Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail observe the first pulsar planets (this was the first confirmed discovery of planets outside the Solar System)
1994: Andrew Wiles proves Fermat's Last Theorem
1995: Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz definitively observe the first extrasolar planet around a main sequence star
1995: Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle attained the first Bose-Einstein Condensate with atomic gases, so called fifth state of matter at an extremely low temperature.
1996: Roslin Institute: Dolly the sheep was cloned.
1997: CDF and DØ experiments at Fermilab: Top quark.
1998: Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-Z Supernova Search Team: discovery of the accelerated expansion of the Universe and dark energy
2000: The Tau neutrino is discovered by the DONUT collaboration

== 21st century ==

2001: The first draft of the Human Genome Project is published.
2003: Grigori Perelman presents proof of the Poincaré Conjecture.
2003: The Human Genome Project sequences the human genome with a 92% accuracy.
2004: Ben Green and Terence Tao announce their proof on arithmetic progressions in prime numbers known as the Green–Tao Theorem.
2004: Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov isolated graphene, a monolayer of carbon atoms, and studied its quantum electrical properties.
2005: Grid cells in the brain are discovered by Edvard Moser and May-Britt Moser.
2010: The first self-replicating, synthetic bacterial cells are constructed.
2010: The Neanderthal Genome Project presented preliminary genetic evidence that interbreeding likely occurred and that a small but significant portion of Neanderthal admixture is present in modern non-African populations.
2012: Higgs boson is discovered at CERN (confirmed to 99.999% certainty)
2012: Photonic molecules are discovered at MIT
2014: Exotic hadrons are discovered at the LHCb
2014: Photonic metamaterials are discovered to make passive daytime radiative cooling possible by Raman et al.
2016: The LIGO team detects gravitational waves from a black hole merger
2017: Gravitational wave signal GW170817 is observed by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration. This is the first instance of a gravitational wave event observed to have a simultaneous electromagnetic signal when space telescopes like Hubble observed lights coming from the event, thereby marking a significant breakthrough for multi-messenger astronomy.
2019: The first image of a black hole is captured, using eight different telescopes taking simultaneous pictures, timed with extremely precise atomic clocks. [1]
2020: NASA and SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) discover about 350 mL of surface water in one of the Moon's largest visible craters.
2022: The standard reference gene, GRCh38.p14, of the human genome, is fully sequenced and contains 3.1 billion base pairs.

== References ==

Boyer, Carl Benjamin (1991). A History of Mathematics (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-0-471-54397-8.

== External links ==
Science Timeline