Genetics People

William Harvey

First proposed our modern understanding of epigenesis

Aristotle

Theorized that sperm contained a ‘vital heat’ which cooked menstrual blood, creating an embryo

Hippocrates

Developed the theory that humors in the male body transferred through the sperm to determine a person’s traits

Edmund Beecher Wilson

Proposed ‘nuclein’ material in nucleus that contained genetic information

Archibald Garrod

First recorded a hereditary genetic disorder - alkaptonuria

Rudolph Virchow

Contributed to cell theory that all cells come from other cells

Schleiden and Schwann

Contributed to cell theory that all life is made of cells

Louis Pasteur

Refuted spontaneous generation

Darwin and Wallace (if you don’t get this wtf)

Developed the theory of natural selection

Gregor Mendel

Showed inheritance is particulate

Fleeming Jenkin

Evolution is incompatible with blended inheritance

William Bateson

Championed Mendel’s ideas when they were rediscovered in the early 1900s

Sutton and Boveri

Observed that chromosomes behaved similar to Mendel’s predictions

Thomas Hunt Morgan

Demonstrated chromosomal inheritance in fruit fly eyes by mapping the eye color gene to the X chromosome

Herman Nilsson-Ehle

Demonstrated that continuous characteristics could be explained by Mendelian inheritance

Carl Woese

Developed the current 3 Domain model of life on Earth