* 1990 – French Anderson et al. performed the first approved gene therapy on a human patient
* 1990 – Napoli, Lemieux and Jorgensen discovered RNA interference (1990) during experiments aimed at the color of petunias.
* 1990 – Wolfgang Krätschmer, Lowell Lamb, Konstantinos Fostiropoulos, and Donald Huffman discovered that Buckminsterfullerene can be separated from soot because it is soluble in benzene.
* 1995 – Publication of the first complete genome of a free-living organism.
* 1995 - Symbion pandora, the first known species from the phylum Cycliophora is described by Reinhardt Kristensen and Peter Funch.
* 1996 –  Dolly the sheep was first clone of an adult mammal.
* 1998 – Mello and Fire publish their work on RNAi in c.elegans, for which they shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
* 1999 – Researchers at the Institute for Human Gene Therapy at the University of Pennsylvania accidentally kill Jesse Gelsinger during a clinical trial of a gene therapy technique, leading the FDA to halt further gene therapy trials at the institute.
* 2000 - Reinhardt Kristensen and Peter Funch describe Limnognathia maerski, the first known species from the phylum Micrognathozoa.
* 2001 - First insects from the suborder Mantophasmatodea are discovered.
* 2001 – Publication of the first drafts of the complete human genome (see Craig Venter).
* 2002 – First virus produced from scratch, an artificial polio virus that paralyzes and kills mice.
* 2007 – Commercialization of Illumina Next generation Sequencing tools. This has become the most popular high-throughput sequencing system.
* 2012 – Use of CRISPR-Cas9 as a DNA-editing biotechnology tool.