A photograph of Gregor Mendel
Gregor Mendel
Marked Brno

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Genes, from Mendel to the genome

Gregor Mendel worked out the rules of inheritance from pea plants in 1865. In 1953 the structure of DNA was described, using Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray photograph, and in 2003 the human genome was read.

Place
Brno · King’s College London · Cambridge · HinxtonThe whole world
Laid out as
An inventionA new way of doing something, link by link: what came before, the breakthrough, and what it changed.
Lessons
7 planned, none written yet
Image
Unknown photographer, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IMendel’s peas
  2. IIChromosomes
  3. IIIPhoto 51
  4. IVThe double helix
  5. VReading the genome
  6. VIEditing genes
  7. VIIAncient DNA

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Gregor Mendel
  • Rosalind Franklin
  • James Watson
  • Francis Crick
  • Jennifer Doudna
  • Emmanuelle Charpentier

Objects

  • Photo 51
  • Watson and Crick’s model

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1865 to now. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?