Figure 1.

A Brief History of DS research. As noted in this outline, the first known publications focused on children with DS occurred in the mid-1800s. In 1866, Dr. John Langdon Down wrote about “the Great Mongolian Family”, and almost a century later the condition was named after him. Dr. Patterson and his colleagues finished decoding Chr. 21 in the late 1990s, and the sequence was first published in year 2000—only the second chromosome to be fully decoded. Thirty years ago, the first non-lethal mouse model for DS—Ts65Dn—was created by Dr. Muriel Davisson. This model has been used extensively to detect the connection between aging-related brain degeneration and DS and is still used today.