On May 20, 1747, James Lind, the ship surgeon of the HMS Salisbury, conducted one of the first clinical trials in medical history and thereby finding a cure for scurvy. Sadly, he did not realize it himself.
On May 14, 1796, the English physician and scientist Edward Jenner tested the “world’s first vaccine” on the eight-year-old James Phipps.
On April 16, 1956, exactly 60 years ago, Arthur Kornberg and his team of biochemists were the first to isolate and later characterize the enzyme which is now known as DNA polymerase I.
On April 1, 1969, Thomas D. Brock and Hudson Freeze published their discovery and cultivation methods of a new species of thermophilic bacteria, which they named Thermus aquaticus.
On March 20, 1996, the government of the United Kingdom first announced the possible connection between the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and the new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD).
On March 6, 1869, Dmitry Mendelejew presented his first version of the periodic table of elements to the Russian Chemical Society.