Holly Ahern | Jun 25, 1995 | 10+ min read
What would you do if your research interests revolved around obtaining DNA from a bacterium preserved for millions of years in the gut of a bee stuck in amber, matching up a murderer to crime- scene blood half a century old, or cloning genes from a 1,000- year-old mummy? Most scientists would first consider PCR--the polymerase chain reaction--as a technique for approaching problems such as these. With PCR, minute quantities of nucleic acids can be amplified millions of times into sufficient qua