The Man Who Took LSD and Changed The World on HackerTube: recommended by 2 Hacker News commenters across 2 separate months, 2024–2026.
documentary · evergreen
Veritasium tells the story of Kary Mullis, the surfer and LSD user who invented PCR and won a Nobel Prize. It explains how PCR works and how it was developed at Cetus.
Recommended as one of the most accessible introductions to PCR and its history.
“It's one of the most accessible videos on PCR I've ever come across”
3 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
Veritassium did a recent video on Kary Mullis and PCR. It's one of the most accessible videos on PCR I've ever come across (I have no background in biology), and also an interesting history of Kary Mullis. ▶ this video
in “Intolerable Genius: Berkeley's Most Controversial Nobel Laureate (2019)” · View on HN
Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (goodreads link: [link] ) for a short video version of this history, see ▶ this video from Veritasium. reasons for recommendation: - it's an example in the biological science, to complement the heavy representation of examples from computer science and entrepreneurship in this thread - the main character, Kary Mullis, is colorful and controversial. Not a likable individual, but nevertheless had traits (mostly an unreasonable obsession) that enabled him to make such a discovery - the discovery of high temperature tolerant enzymes predated Mullis' insight by some two decades, and it played a key role in making PCR practical and widely applicable. this is a pattern I have seen often in major inventions, which were made possible by prior discoveries (often decades old) which lay dormant until someone put everything together. This process of re-discovering the pieces and making connections is also where I think machine learning could be particularly helpful. In fact this is my main motivation for picking up this book (by online reviews, not a particularly well-written one).
in “Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things” · View on HN
one of the coolest parts about the original inception was the application of taq polymerase. veritasium did a video of about it not too long ago. a friend of mine and a man whom i very much respect was mullis's lab manager at the time. ▶ this video
in “PCR Is a (Surprisingly) Near-Optimal Technology” · View on HN