text: In 1979, teams at Harvard and Caltech extended the basic idea of making DNA copies of mRNAs in vitro to amplifying a library of such in bacterial plasmids.
  In 1982,  the idea of selecting random or semi-random clones from such a cDNA library for sequencing was explored by Greg Sutcliffe and coworkers.
  In 1983, Putney  et al. sequenced 178  clones from  a  rabbit muscle cDNA  library.
  In 1991, Adams and co-workers coined the term EST and initiated more systematic sequencing as a project (starting with 600 brain cDNAs).