About us
Cambio Head Office
1 The Irwin Centre
Scotland Road
Dry Drayton
Cambridge
CB23 8AR
Company Registration Number: 1964088, England & Wales
VAT Number: GB 479 8703 82
Non-Executive Chairman: PDG Dean Ma DSc DPhil FRSC
The Early PCR Machines
PCR was discovered by Nobel prize winner Gobind Khorana (who did his PhD in Liverpool University) and his team, which included Kleppe a Norwegian post doc in his lab.
They called the process Polymerase Assisted Repair Replication but it took the discovery of thermostable polymerases and a Californian ,Cetus, and their team to exploit the reaction. The amplifications available from this remarkable process (30,000,000 times is commonplace) were used to develop every aspect of biology and made more impact on this subject than any other invention previously.
Martin Evans (now Professor Sir Martin Evans!) approached me in 1986 with a design for a machine to carry out PCR reactions. At the time, everyone was using three water baths and manually carrying the tubes from one to the other. This worked efficiently but took up half the laboratory. Martin's machine was designed around the very powerful quartz halogen lamps used in cookers at the time, a fan from a desktop computer and the famous BBC computer to provide real time visual evidence of the temperatures in the tube (measured by having one tube dedicated to report the temperature using a thermocouple). Very thin block tube blocks and thermocouples (one in the tube and one in the body of the block) were a feature of these early British machines (the Intelligent Heating Block, IHB) and were patented by Martin and myself.
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Other early designs consisted of coils of very fine glass tubing around which the reaction mix travelled passing in and out of a heated box and over immobilised Klenow polymerase, which could not stand the high temperatures, required to separate the DNA strands. The breakthrough came with the thermostable polymerase from Thermus aquaticus so called Taq.
The University of Cambridge Department of Engineering made the first printed circuit control board for the IHB and the successful prototype was made Dr Peter Tillet (also of Cambridge) in late 1987.
Dr Rod Daniels was the first customer and drove to Cambridge from his laboratory in Mill Hill (National Institute for Medical Research) on a Saturday morning (it meant that much to him). The machine pictured above is in fact Dr Daniels original machine, which he kindly returned to me and I have now presented this to the Science Museum (London) for future display.
Peter Dean
