Milestones in Bacteriology

Bacteriology's key milestones run from C.G. Ehrenberg coining the very word 'Bacterium' in 1829, through Christian Gram's differential staining method (1884) and David Bergey's first Manual of bacterial identification (1923), to two discoveries central to bacterial genetics - Fredrick Griffith's discovery of bacterial transformation (1928) and Joshua Lederberg's discovery of the plasmid (1952). Together these five milestones trace the field's progression from simply naming and describing bacteria, through developing a reliable way to tell species apart under the microscope, to building the standard reference manual still used for bacterial identification, and finally uncover …