I volunteer with a museum which has the motto “history never sleeps”. And history has certainly not gone to sleep tracking the advances in DNA and genomics since the April 25, 1953 announcement that began “We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.”

Below is a timeline of some major developments in DNA from 1953 to the present.

In the weeks leading up to the anniversary of the Watson/Crick announcement last year, I wrote a series of blogs (Part 1, Part 2, ) detailing some historic background. This year, as I was thinking about April 25 again, I thought that it would be fun to track some of the major advances that have been made as a result of Watson and Crick’s contribution to the study of life. I had an idea that I would like to compare the timeline to an actual strand of DNA. So my first stop was the personal genome information button found on Genome Alberta’s front page. Here you can view information shared by my colleague Mike after he had his genome partially sequenced by 23andME and deCode. From there, I went to the Promethease Report (a tool which helps interpret SNPs) and found an actual segment of DNA to use for my timeline.

There were a lot of developments since 1953. For my timeline, I chose to start with the information on the timeline that has been part of the Genome Alberta presentations for a number of years. I found that I had been modifying that timeline as developments have taken place since it was first put together. Additionally, when I looked very closely at it, I realized that there was a ‘transcription’ error on it which had not been caught or corrected even though it has been viewed by many people. Then, I added some crucial developments from the early 1960s and 1970s that lead directly from the predications of the Watson and Crick model of DNA. Support for a model increases as predictions from the model are verified. In the years since 1953, support for this model for DNA has become very strong indeed. In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick were using some paper cut-outs and lab clamps to put together a model that appears in their picture to be about 10 bases long. By 2007, James Watson could have built this model complete and accurate for his entire personal genome made up of 3164.7 million bases (A, C, T, and G).