Interviewee: Mary-Claire King. Tedious process of early gene hunting. (DNAi Location: Timeline > 1990s)

Twenty-five years ago when I began this work this was an extraordinarily tedious process because there were very few such flags, a few dozen. There was also no quick way of evaluating them, so one had to do the evaluation, tedious flag by tedious flag, using procedures that took three weeks from the beginning of the experiment to the end, and then one had one result. And then one went on to one more result. It was incredibly slow going. The invention of PCR made a huge difference to us, because it meant that instead of three weeks we were now down to three hours between the time that we would begin an analysis and could end it. But the most critical component in all of this, next to the families themselves, was the existence of a genetic map, so that we could, for a family like this, identify markers on every single chromosome, all the way up and down chromosome 1, all the way up and down chromosome 2, and so on all the way through chromosome 22 and X and Y.

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