UPDATE: Bradley Fikes has been bugging me to add a correction to this post. His argument, which I acknowledge without really buying it, is that the discovery of DNA Polymerase by Kornberg in 1958, qualfies as “created DNA in a test tube.” His work received a Nobel Prize but I’m not sure it merits this statement: “It has been 50 years since scientists first created DNA in a test tube, stitching ordinary chemical ingredients together to make life’s most extraordinary molecule. ” He discovered the mechanism for DNA synthesis and was able to produce nucleotide chains. Anyway, maybe Badley has a point.
The Washington Post today has a piece on synthetic DNA that is interesting although it contains a few errors. The first is that scientists did not “create DNA” 50 years ago. Watson and Crick, with a lot of help from others, some of whom they neglected to credit, discovered that DNA is the genetic code. In 1983, Kerry Mullis discovered the polymerase chain reaction, which will make thousands of copies of a small fragment of DNA. This allows the use of DNA in forensic science, as in the “Innocence Project” which uses DNA found at a crime scene to be magnified to measurable amounts for analysis. It still isn’t “creating DNA”, it is merely copying it.
Aside from that quibble, and there are probably a few other errors I don’t recognize, the potential for this technology is enormous. I have previously posted on this topic but it is interesting to see it in the main stream media, errors and all.
Tags: Crick, DNA, DNA Polymerase, genetics, Kerry Mullis, Kornberg, polymerase chain reaction, Watson
Dr. K., I tell my introductory cell and molecular biology students that at the end fo the course, they know more about biology than the vast majority of members of Congress. Heck, that was probably true at the beginning of the course. So I am glad that the media is writing about New Biology.
Kary Mullis is a real character. Have you read much about him?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis
He is the picture perfect definition of a drug-addled contrarian. And I’m not sure he would see that description as an insult!
Many people have questioned Mullis’ “idea” of PCR, because of work done by Gobind Khorana of MIT in the late 1960s. I don’t know how to evaluate that; certainly Mullis’ work changed the face of biology.
Even if he is a flake outside of nucleic acid chemistry!
The WaPo story reference to synthesizing DNA is accurate. Arthur Kornberg was the first to accomplish the feat, in the late 1950s.