Biology Forum › Molecular Biology › Who should be credited for invention of PCR reaction?
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- April 1, 2006 at 6:27 pm #4274
HELISAParticipantWho should be credited for invention of PCR reaction?
Dr. Kerry Mullis who discovered a method to start and stop DNA polymerase enzyme activity at specific points along a single strand DNA or Gobing Khorana, who described a basic principle of replicating a piece of DNA using two primers…What do you think about that? - April 1, 2006 at 7:49 pm #44835MjhavokParticipant
I got this from wikipedia.com
"Kary Banks Mullis (b. December 28, 1944) is an American biochemist who developed the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a central technique in molecular biology which allows the amplification of specified DNA sequences, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Japan Prize in 1993. "
Hope it helps
- April 1, 2006 at 11:36 pm #44848HELISAParticipant
The same source (Wikipedia)
"A lingering controversy and court-cases surround the PCR invention and patent, mostly due to work done by late Kjell Kleppe, a Norwegian scientist working at Nobel Laureate H. Gobind Khorana’s famous Institute for Enzyme Research at University of Wisconsin from 1968 to 1970. In 1969, Kleppe published papers describing the principles of PCR. Details around this work are available in a Science article by Arthur Kornberg, February 1991, and a 20-page article by Kleppe and Khorana in Journal of Molecular Biology, 1971. Arthur Kornberg described in a later interview how Stuart Linn, professor at University of California, Berkeley, used Kleppe’s papers in his own classes, in which Kary Mullis was a student at the time. But no one questions that Mullis was the creator of the thermus aquaticus PCR method in such widespread use today.The anthropologist Paul Rabinow wrote a book on the history of the PCR method in 1996 which questioned whether or not Mullis "invented" PCR or "merely" came up with the concept of it (the key difference being that it was not actually Mullis himself who was able to make the process workable). Rabinow interviewed Mullis’s co-workers at Cetus Corporation who reported that Mullis as a person was quite unpredictable and problematic, and that PCR was the only one of his many ambitious ideas to pan out. "
So…who is the inventor of PCR? - April 8, 2006 at 6:19 am #45405angelParticipant
Well, Dr. Khorana gave the original concept but it was not approved at that time as then hardly anyone could imagine that synthesis of nucleotides was feasible. Karry Mullis must be given some credit as he made the idea accepted world wide, but still him using the klenow fragment of E.Coli DNA pol. was a time consuming and wasteful practice. This is further important as at that time the thermostable polymerases had already been discovered. So, Saiki et al were the people, who used taq and made the process a revolution. Still, Karry Mullis is termed as the inventor.
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