Hans Spemann
Walter Sutton
Oswald Avery
Francis Crick
James Watson
Paul Berg
Stanley Cohen
Herbert Boyer
Kary B. Mullis
Steen Willadsen
Ian Wilmut
Keith Campbell
Richard Seed

The inventor of the DNA synthesis process known as the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR). The process is an invaluable tool to today's molecular biologists and biotechnology corporations.

Mullis, born in Lenoir, North Carolina, attended the University of Georgia Tech for his undergraduate work in chemistry, and then obtained a Ph. D. in biochemistry from Cal Berkeley.

In 1983, working for Cetus Corporation, Mullis developed the Polymerase Chain Reaction, a technique for the rapid synthesis of a DNA sequence. The simple process involved heating a vial containing the DNA fragment to the split the two strands of the DNA molecule, adding oligonucleotide primers to bring about reproduction, and finally using polymerase to replicate the DNA strands. Each cycle doubles the amount of DNA, so multiple cycles increase the amount of DNA exponentially, creating huge numbers of copies of the DNA fragment.

Mullis left Cetus in 1986. For his development of PCR, he was co-awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1993. Mullis is currently doing HIV and AIDS research.

Technique: Polymerase Chain Reaction

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Photo: Kary B. Mullis
Biography: Kary B. Mullis

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