Frederick Sanger
Genetic inheritance was first discovered by Gregor Mendel in 1865, following experiments crossing peas. In 1928 Frederick Griffith proved the existence of a "transforming principle" involved in inheritance, which was identified as DNA in 1944 by Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty. Frederick Sanger developed a method for sequencing DNA in 1977, greatly increasing the genetic information available to researchers.