Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (1996) 02/09/05. Reviewed by Jon Turney Anthropologist Paul Rabinow reports from the lab.

The word 'revolution' is often bandied about when people talk of modern genetics and biotech, but there is no doubt that the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) produced a revolution in the genetic laboratories of the 1980s. Researchers who wanted to study a particular stretch of DNA had been able to copy it for some time, but only by relatively laborious and often hit-and-miss procedures involving splicing and cloning in bacteria.

Suddenly, they had a technique which dispensed with the bacteria and just used a set of enzymes to amplify small amounts of DNA as many times as they wished. It was quickly automated, and became the standard kit in every molecular genetics lab in the world.

The story of PCR can be told many different ways. Kary Mullis, who won a Nobel Prize for conceiving the technique, is pretty much the unaided hero of his own book, Dancing Naked in the Mindfield.

Paul Rabinow has a more complex tale to tell. His study is no ordinary popular science book, but is the very readable result of an anthropologist's sojourn in the biotech world in California.

As he makes clear, there were many different problems to solve, and many people aside from Mullis contributing, to turn PCR from an idea to a working technology which could be marketed, sold and delivered in usable form.

As he sees it, the world of biotech companies, venture capital, research and development and academic-industrial interaction in the new genetics was a new "form of life" in the making, which both shaped and was shaped by technologies like PCR. He wanted to provide a picture of its emergence which gave due weight to "a distinctive configuration of scientific, technical, cultural, social, economic, polital and legal elements" which made up the new biotechnology.

If that sounds a little forbidding, the main text is sober but engaging in its studied avoidance of the 'gosh-wow' of much conventional science writing. It simply reports what he found, mostly in the words of the people interviewed, when he ventured into this new world. Because the people are invariably highly talented, interesting and reflective, and busy crafting a world-changing technology, this understated approach is extremely effective.

He gives an unusually detailed inside view of the Cetus corporation, the first biotech start-up and the one which brought PCR to market, and the characters who it brought together. Some were young scientists who had been tempted to forgo academic life for a different kind of work, some researchers and managers from big drug companies who were hoping for different rewards in a new-style company.

They were by turns inspired, stressed, disheartened, frustrated, confused – as much with each other as with the technique – and, ultimately, successful. All had to find ways of working together which enabled them to forge a new technology. And that technology is still driving discovery in all the sciences that need to know about DNA.

Book details

Paperback 196 pages (November 1997)
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226701476