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- ...and he did win a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1993
- I'm Kary Mullis. I figured out how to pinpoint specific sections of DNA and synthesize them into humongous amounts of copies. It'll be called Polymerase Chain Reaction–PCR! Everyone will use my method. I'll be famous! I'll get a Nobel Prize!
- 1983: Bay Area --> Menocino
- Other coworkers and I do NOT like Mullis's personality and want to fight him. His idea isn't even going to work because he's always so eccentric and makes elementary biology mistakes.
- Cetus Corporation in Emeryville, California: one of the world's first biotech companies
- I brought my idea back to Cetus to show my colleagues. With my idea for PCR, we could start with a single piece of DNA, have 2 copies after one PCR cycle, and after 30 cycles, have over a billion copies!
- With the help of colleague scientists Stephen Scharf, Fred Faloona, Randall Saiki, and others, PCR was finally declared a success by the end of 1984.
- I kept working on my idea and obtained some experimental data that showed that it worked.
- Hey, I'm Thomas White, your boss, but we were friends at grad school at UC Berkeley. I'll help you out!
- Mullis did finally write a paper that was published in 1987's Methods in Enzymology after being rejected by multiple other journals. It was a less prestigious paper than Saiki's.
- I won't write a paper about PCR, though, because everyone doubted me!
- (Saiki) Fine, I'll refer to it in a paper I'm co-authoring about a sickle cell anemia test in Science journal.
- (White) Mullis, please just write about PCR in detail in another paper!
- I can't believe I wasn't the original author to write about PCR, the test that I invented! I'm leaving Cetus! I'm better than all my "friends" and colleagues there, and they don't deserve me!
- Cetus kept the rights to the PCR invention
- Since then, there have been many more advancements regarding PCR, and the test has served many uses, including testing for SARS-CoV-2.
- Thankfully, before he left, Mullis suggested using polymerase from microbes found in Yellowstone National Park's hot springs to solve the problem of DNA polymerase getting degraded by the heat required to perform a PCR cycle. Two Cetus scientists flew out to Wisconsin to collect microbes with microbiologist Thomas Brock, and after we tested with the new polymerase, it was successful!
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