On Mar. 8, 1984,  two articles describing the cloning of the T-Cell Receptor (TCR) by Tak Wah Mak (Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Toronto, Ontario, Canada) and one by Mark Davis and Stephen Hedrick (Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA) appeared one after another on in Nature.

Within a year, the alpha chain of the TCR was cloned, and the complete structure of the TCR was ultimately revealed.

In August 1983, the Mark Davis group announced to the immunological community gathered at the International Congress of Immunology in Kyoto, Japan, that they had successfully isolated an mRNA encoding a component of the mouse TCR.