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© 2009 American Association for Clinical Chemistry, Inc.
Inspiring Minds |
Carl Wittwer
Sponsored by the AACC History Division and Department of Laboratory Medicine Children’s Hospital Boston
e-mail misia_landau@gmail.com
| The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In the novel Flatland—one of Carl Wittwer’s favorite books—a humble square living in a two-dimensional world journeys to a universe filled with spheres, cubes, and other filled-out shapes. Astounded, he returns home to share the news only to be thrown into prison for preaching the heresy of three dimensions.
It’s not surprising that Wittwer counts the book among his favorites—even as a kid, he was known for his exotic taste. "Friends would make fun of me because I liked to read these very big books about seemingly obscure subjects," said Wittwer, professor of pathology at the University of Utah Medical School. He was a big fan of the Gormenghast trilogy by the British fantasy writer Mervyn Peake, which depicts a dark, cobwebbed, Byzantine world crumbling beneath the weight of centuries of treachery, corruption, and repressive ritual.
In sixth grade, while prowling around the local college bookstore, he was drawn to a big orange and black tome with the barely intelligible words, Atomic Physics, emblazoned on its cover. "For some reason I latched onto this," he said. The book would inspire a life-defining interest in science.
But Flatland, with its dimension-hopping hero, captures something quintessential about Carl Wittwer. Colleagues know him as a brilliant and pioneering scientist who turned polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a mainstay of molecular biological research, from a laborious and time-consuming task into a quick and easy method—overturning fundamental assumptions about how DNA behaves in the process.
He would transform PCR into a tool not just for replicating genes but for analyzing their differences. "He comes up with ways of seeing and using what is not obvious to other people," said Kirk Ririe, CEO of Idaho Technology, Inc. (ITI).
In 1990, he would take his innovations to market by partnering not with big business but