Technology Timeline
Wilhelm Röentgen, a German physicist, discovered a new type of radiation which he temporarily called “x-rays” (x for unknown). He figured out that these “x-rays” could pass through paper, wood, and skin. Two weeks after this discovery, he took the very first medical x-ray of his wife’s hand (Wikipedia).
1895
Walter Dandy introduces the technique of ventriculography, or X-ray images of the ventricular system in the brain using injections of filtered air into one or both lateral ventricles of the brain (Wikipedia).
1918
Willard Libby and a team of coworkers including James Arnold and Ernie Anderson are the first to use radiocarbon dating using the radioactive isotope Carbon-14. They test it by trying their method on samples of wood with a known age. The chronological measurements produced by the test matched up. They have revolutionized a way to date previously unknown artifacts of ancient humans (University of Arizona).
1947
1969
An American company founded by Arnold O. Beckman called Beckman Coulter produces the first known protein sequencer. Not very much information can be found on its exact origins, but the machine itself is used in determining the specific amino acid sequence in a protein.
The first DNA sequencing methods are developed by Gilbert and Sanger. A DNA sequence is used to determine the specific order of the DNA bases: Adenine, Guanine, Thymine, Cytosine (Wikipedia). Scientists can now use this to determine the exact genomic differences between humans and other primates.
1973-75
Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield and Allan McLeod Cormack introduce computerized axial tomography (aka a CAT or CT scan). This is a much more detailed image of the brain, and Cormack and Hounsfield won the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their work. A CAT/CT scan works by using computer processed x-rays to make topographical images of a specific scanned object, which lets someone look inside that parts of the body without cutting it open (Wikipedia).
1975
The Scottish professor John Mallard led a team that built the very first full boy MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanner at the University of Aberdeen. MRI scanners use strong magnetic andradiowaves to form images of the body (Wikipedia).
1977
Mallard’s team used the MRI scanner to obtain the first clinically useful image of a patient’s internal tissues, successfully identifying a tumor in that patient’s chest, and cancer in his bones (Wikipedia).
August 28, 1980
The scientific research project known as the Human Genome Project is completed when the sequence of chemical base pairs that make up DNA is fully mapped. David Galas and James Watson (of Watson and Crick, the scientists who discovered the correct structure of DNA) were at the heads of the two main funding agencies for the project (Wikipedia).
2003
