Saturday, March 08, 2008
Polymerase Chain Reaction
The other day I was talking with several colleagues about PCR, or the polymerase chain reaction. We first started to hear about it in the mid-1980's and I was not very impressed. It was a cool reaction but what the heck was it good for? I didn't think I would ever have a need to learn about PCR.
Today's citation classic on The Evilutionary Biologist proves just how wrong I was about PCR [This Week's Citation Classic]. John Dennehy talks about it's inventor Kary Mullis, an "interesting guy" (one of the understatements of the year). Mullis is by far the most embarrassing Noble Laureate.
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5 comments :
I'm not sure that Mullis is a bigger embarrassment then Brian Josephson, backer of ESP, PK, and cold fusion.
It's not embarrassing, considering the selection criteria for the award. The science prizes are not given for lifetime achievement but for the specific impact of a particular discovery. Mullis definitely deserved the award.
Of course it was the isolation and optimization of heat-stable DNA polymerases that made the technique a real success.
Embarrassing would be electing Kary into the US National Academy of Sciences... like Duesberg.
The whole LSD-PCR story is one of the great biology stories, every undergrad deserves to hear it!
"Interesting" is one of those words I use to be diplomatic. It can be variously interpreted :P
One thing that I found in my research that was really surprising (but didn't mention) was that the PCR was conceived by Kjell Klepp, who presented the idea at a Gordon Conference in 1969. Klepp and Gobind Khorana et al. later published paper on PCR in the 1971 in the Journal of Molecular Biology. At this point the technique was used to replicate 4 copies of DNA! The problem was the lack of a thermostable polymerase which was supposedly Mullis' main contribution.
So apparently you are not the only one to overlook the significance of the PCR.
Kleppe K, Ohtsuka E, Kleppe R, Molineux I, Khorana HG.Studies on polynucleotides. XCVI. Repair replications of short synthetic DNA's as catalyzed by DNA polymerases. J Mol Biol. 1971 Mar 14;56(2):341-61.
"Mullis is by far the most embarrassing Noble Laureate."
True. But I found his talk in the Medical School of Cologne back in the 90s really funny because all those serious physicians wearing their white coats were quite perturbed when every second of the slides showed half naked women from a swim suit calendar.
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