200’s B.C., Archimedes discovered the laws of the lever and the pulley.

Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, emphasized careful observation in his scientific studies.

Arab astronomers of the eighth century A.D. mapped the heavenly bodies. The Arabs also made major advances in mathematics, medicine, and optics.

Nicolaus Copernicus of Poland in 1543 put forth On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, in which he presented his sun-centered theory.

In 1609 Johannes Kepler established astronomy as an exact science.

Galileo designed the pendulum clock in 1641; Galileo saw the need for precise scientific instruments.

Experiments with prisms conducted in the 1600’s by Sir Isaac Newton of England began the modern study of optics. Newton demonstrated that sunlight is a mixture of light of all colors.

Scientific classification of plants and animals was begun by Carolus Linnaeus of Sweden in the 1700’s.

Theodor Schwann of Germany in the 1830’s helped prove, through drawings of cells, that cells make up all organisms.

Beak adaptations in finches on the Galapagos Islands were noted by the British naturalist Charles Darwin. Darwin used such species variations to support his theories of evolution, which he set forth in The Origin of Species, 1859.

Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, discovered the basic laws of heredity in the mid-1800’s. He studied the inheritance of various traits in garden pea plants.

Louis Pasteur of France started modern microbiology in the mid-1800’s with his discovery that certain kinds of microscopic organisms cause disease.

Max Planck, a German physicist, advanced his quantum theory in 1900. The theory states that energy is given off in a stream of separate units called quanta.

In 1928 Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, the first antibiotic.

Enrico Fermi and others at the University of Chicago achieved the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in 1942, starting the atomic age.

A ladder-like model of DNA was built by James Watson of the United States and Francis Crick of England in 1953.

Scottish scientists pioneer first cloning of a mammal—Dolly the sheep—science’s most stunning achievement in 1997.

1999, COSMOS is born. Responding to the State of California Education Code, the Regents of the University of California establish a program for students who wish to learn advanced mathematics and sicence in preparaton for careers in these areas. COSMOS-UCI's first year program began with a faculty advisory committee and twenty-two faculty providing instruction to students from more than 100 California public and private high schools.

Completed in 2003, the Human Genome Project identified all the genes in human DNA.