A late-night drive gave a chemist the idea that reshaped genetics

In 1983, Kary Mullis was driving through California when he worked out a way to copy a single strand of DNA billions of times using nothing but heat and enzymes. The technique, polymerase chain reaction, took years to be taken seriously but now underlies DNA fingerprinting, ancestry tests and COVID PCR tests. Mullis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it in 1993.

— Wikipedia contributors, Kary Mullis — Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1993