THE POSITIVE PROFESSOR
SOCIAL media’s voice of calm Karol Sikora has been signed up by the Daily Express. Readers can now enjoy his soothing advice in these troubled times that have won him hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. If you need reassuring everything’s going to be all right read Professor Positivity.
EVEN my young grandchildren now know what a PCR is. The polymerase chain reaction, the fundamental process that let British scientists map the coronavirus genome, has a fascinating history.
One evening after work in 1983, Kary Mullis, a scientist at the Cetus Corporation – a large US biotech company – was driving through the Californian desert with Jenny, his girlfriend. He had been working on the analysis of small pieces of DNA – the thread of life.
As he drove, he had a lightbulb moment. He came up with the concept of primers – making small pieces of DNA that would bind at two defined points in a gene. Then he would use a polymerase enzyme to amplify the piece of DNA in between the primers by a chain reaction.
For the next few months, he did little else. And it worked – he could detect specific sequences of DNA rapidly and easily.
His discovery revolutionised science across many disciplines: cancer, cardiology, forensics, genetics, genomics, infectious diseases – no area of medicine was untouched. Most of us have had PCR tests without even knowing. Kary got many accolades and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1993 but the story doesn’t have a happy ending.
He was given a $10,000 prize for innovation by his employer, which owned the patent. It sold it to Roche for $300million. Kary spent the rest of his life embittered. I heard him talk at a conference in San Francisco and I could see he was not a happy man even though he had a brilliant mind. He was obsessed by the unfairness of life.
He formed a company that took DNA from stars including Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, amplified it by PCR and embedded it in jewellery.
Sadly, he died in 2019 at the age of 74. But he left us with the most wonderful tool for the future of medicine.