Inventor of the PCR, Kary Mullis, Dies
Kary Mullis, whose invention of the polymerase chain reaction technique earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993, died of pneumonia on August 7 at 74 years old.
Writing in The Scientist in 2003, Mullis described his first attempt at PCR in 1983 as “a long-shot experiment. . . . so [at midnight] I poured myself a cold Becks into a prechilled 500 ml beaker from the isotope freezer for luck, and went home. I ran a gel the next afternoon [and] stained it with ethidium. It took several months to arrive at conditions [that] would produce a convincing result.”
Both Science and Nature rejected the resulting manuscript, which was ultimately published in Methods in Enzymology in 1987.
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