Table 1.

Historical overview of pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics

Year	Individual(s)	Landmark
510 bc	Pythagoras	Recognition of the dangers of ingesting fava beans, later characterized to be due to deficiency of G6PD [1]
1866	Mendel	Establishment of the rules of heredity [11]
1906	Garrod	Publication of ‘Inborn Errors of Metabolism’ [12]
1932	Snyder	Characterization of the ‘phenylthiourea nontaster’ as an autosomal recessive trait [13]
1956	Carson et al.	Discovery of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency [14]
1957	Motulsky	Further refined the concept that inherited defects of metabolism may explain individual differences in drug response [15]
1957	Kalow & Genest	Characterization of serum cholinesterase deficiency [16]
1957	Vogel	Coined the term pharmacogenetics [17]
1960	Price Evans	Characterization of acetylator polymorphism [18]
1962	Kalow	Publication of ‘Pharmacogenetics – Heredity and the Response to Drugs’ [19]
1977/79	Mahgoub et al. and Eichelbaum et al.	Discovery of the polymorphism in debrisoquine hydroxylase sparteine oxidase [20, 21]
1988	Gonzalez et al.	Characterization of the genetic defect in debrisoquine hydroxylase, later termed CYP2D6 [22]
1988–2000	Various	Identification of specific polymorphisms in various phase I and phase II drug metabolizing enzymes, and latterly in drug transporters
2000	Public-private partnership	Completion of the first draft of the human genome [23, 24]
2000	The International SNP Map Working Group	Completion of map of human genome sequence variation containing 1.42 million SNPs [5]