Nat'l Academies Press, Biotechnology Unzipped: (1997), page 28, in chapter Chapter 1: How Biotechnology Came About

It becomes difficult at this point in the story to avoid a textbook-like complexity, with descriptions of sections of genes that don't code for amino acids, sections that carry instructions for starting and stopping protein building, sections that overlap with each other, and so on. But although there's much more that can be said about the action of genes, you don't need these additional details in order to make sense of biotechnology. The table below summarizes the history outlined so far. Before bringing this account to an end, I'll just make one more point about the link between genes and proteins.

Steps on the road to biotechnology

Year	Event
1665	Robert Hooke describes and names cells
1675	Anton van Leeuwenhoek develops better microscopes and discovers microorganisms, bacteria, and sperm cells
1839	Matthias Schleiden and Theodore Schwann state their cell theory
1859	Charles Darwin publishes On The Origin of Species, establishing the theory of natural selection
1866	Gregor Mendel publishes Experiments With Plant Hybrids, outlining the principles of heredity
1869	Johann Miescher makes the first chemical analysis of nucleic acid
1902	Archibald Garrod speculates that genes consist of instructions for making proteins
1910	Thomas Hunt Morgan establishes that genes are located on chromosomes
1928	Fred Griffith finds that a "transforming principle" (genetic material) carries the trait of virulence from dead bacterial cells to live ones
1941	George Beadle and Edward Tatum establish that one gene makes one enzyme

How genes make proteins