The DNA-copying idea that hit him on a midnight drive

In 1983, Cetus Corporation chemist Kary Mullis said the idea for PCR — exponentially copying a single strand of DNA using two primers and repeated heating cycles — came to him during a night drive on California's Pacific Coast Highway, by his own account. He demonstrated it that December. A decade later he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and PCR now underlies most DNA testing, including COVID-19 diagnostics.

— Kary B. Mullis, History of polymerase chain reaction — Invented at Cetus Corporation, 1983; Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1993