The World Health Organization (WHO) declares smallpox eradicated.

DNASTAR was founded in the E. coli lab of Dr. Fred Blattner, Professor of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Release of the Macintosh 128k, the first mass-market personal computer to feature a GUI, built-in screen, and a mouse.

Fred Sanger, Wally Gilbert and Paul Berg share the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for pioneering DNA sequencing methods.

DNASTAR is trademarked and the company releases software for the “SeqEasy” sequencer digitizer.

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is developed by Dr. Kary Mullis at the Cetus Corporation in CA, USA. Dr. Mullis goes on to win a Nobel Prize for this invention in 1993.