Now in use everywhere -- discovering PCR – and not understanding what you have been given

Many years ago, during a family trip to Colorado, a friend told me a story that provides an inside look at how scientists work. I was just beginning serious research for my first book and we were discussing creativity and the process of discovery. He was a well-known cancer researcher and taught at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

He told me he would sometimes prefer to forget this story. I asked if it had ever been written down anywhere. He said no. He and all of his associates found it too upsetting to recall or record -- but he told me it was alright for me to tell the story.

Years ago, one of his friends was a young researcher in a biochemistry laboratory and was performing a procedure intended to destroy DNA, the molecular blueprint for self-replication carried in all living cells. She was annoyed, however, at not being able to make the procedure work as intended.

Each time she measured the results of her work, she came up with more DNA than she started with. The researcher tried again and again. But each time she was disappointed to discover that she had more DNA rather than less once again. Her coworkers were sympathetic and tried to help her. But no solution to the problem could be found. She eventually dropped the project and went on to other tasks.

Some years later, another scientist in a different laboratory successfully developed a new method to create DNA, making many copies— and he subsequently received a Nobel Prize for his discovery. The young researcher and her former colleagues are still asking themselves how it is that they did not recognize what was really going on when her project repeatedly failed.

The story of the second scientist is now well known in scientific circles. The discoverer was Kary B. Mullis, who shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with another scientist, Michael Smith. Mullis received the prize for his development of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) that makes it possible to rapidly make thousands or millions of copies of specific DNA sequences. The improvements provided by Mullis have made the PCR technique of central importance in molecular biology and biochemistry.

According to the Nobel Prize presentation at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences: “Using this method it is possible to amplify and isolate in a test tube a specific DNA segment within a background of a complex gene pool. In this repetitive process the number of copies of the specific DNA segment doubles during each cycle. In a few hours it is possible to achieve more than 20 cycles, which produces over a million copies.”

Of course, the story is so upsetting because she had the discovery right there in front of her, but she was so focused on her seemingly failed project that she could not see the value of her experiment’s results.

Such stories teach us. Sometimes a gift is seen only as a problem, something that would be quickly wished away had we the power. Sometimes the most important thing is to be able to recognize the gift for what it is, even though it was not requested or desired.

For this to be possible, it is helpful (in spite of one’s training) not to be wholly focused on the narrow inter- ests of the moment—no matter how serious the task, no matter how large the grant, no matter how urgent the deadline. One has to be open to new possibilities, to looking at things a different way, to being able to see what you have been given, even when it is not what you asked for.

The role of chance or fortuitous accident is one of several themes that recur repeatedly in the literature of creativity, especially creativity in the sciences. I do not assume that all creativity is necessarily associated with some form of learning disability or learning difference. However, I do believe that a number of traits associated with dyslexia, other learning differences, and especially high visual-spatial talents may tend to predispose some individuals to greater creativity than might exist otherwise.

Being able to do what others want you to do, in the way they want you to do it, is seductive. If you can, you will. But if you cannot, you will have to find another way. It is a form of accidental self-selection. If it is possible to do it in the same way, successfully, often a new way will not be tried.

Thus, if a truly original method is needed, the conventionally successful student or researcher may be the last one to find it. Sometimes only among those who have repeatedly failed is there a high likelihood of success.

From Seeing What Others Cannot See, TG West, pages 69-71.