J. M. Adovasio and his students began the excavation of Meadowcroft, west of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in June 1970. It was subsequently shown to have been inhabited by humans as early as nineteen thousand years ago — eight thousand years earlier than other known North American sites.

Independently David Baltimore and Howard Martin Temin found an enzyme called reverse transcriptase, which makes possible the transcription of RNA onto DNA. Previously it was thought that genetic information only moved one way, from DNA to RNA. They shared the Nobel Prize in 1975 for this discovery.

In 1973 Charles H. Bennett showed how to build a computer without the components known to cause energy loss.

In April 1978 David Botstein, Ronald Davis, and Mak Skolnick proposed that DNA sequencing can be used to identify genetic diseases in utero, paving the way for fetal genetic screening.

In 1974 Samuel Chao Chung Ting and Burton Richter...