Veritasium
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2024–2026
33:40 · 11M views · Dec 26, 2024
Veritasium tells the story of Kary Mullis, the surfer and LSD user who invented PCR and won a Nobel Prize. It explains how PCR works and how it was developed at Cetus.
Recommended as one of the most accessible introductions to PCR and its history.
3 comments from Hacker News
Veritassium did a recent video on Kary Mullis and PCR. It's one of the most accessible videos on PCR I've ever come across (I have no background in biology), and also an interesting history of Kary Mullis. this video
Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (goodreads link: [LINK] ) for a short video version of this history, see this video from Veritasium. reasons for recommendation: - it's an example in the biological science, to complement the heavy representation of examples from computer science and entrepreneurship in this thread - the main character, Kary Mullis, is colorful and controversial. Not a likable individual, but nevertheless had traits (mostly an unreasonable obsession) that enabled him to make such a discovery - the discovery of high temperature tolerant enzymes predated Mullis' insight by some two decades, and it played a key role in making PCR practical and widely applicable. this is a pattern I have seen often in major inventions, which were made possible by prior discoveries (often decades old) which lay dormant until someone put everything together. This process of re-discovering the pieces and making connections is also where I think machine learning could be particularly helpful. In fact this is my main motivation for picking up this book (by online reviews, not a particularly well-written one).
one of the coolest parts about the original inception was the application of taq polymerase. veritasium did a video of about it not too long ago. a friend of mine and a man whom i very much respect was mullis's lab manager at the time. this video