The Institute of #Molecular #Medicine at #Oxford, where the author works, has done pioneering work on the genetic causes on blood and bone disease. The author originally planned to analyze the genetic sequence of collagen production in ancient human bone samples.

Around this time, a #genetic #engineer named Kary Mullis won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for discovering a new method to extract DNA from biological samples. He could cause a PCR reaction from both ends of a DNA strand simultaneous