In 1993, Kary Mullis won a Nobel Prize for discovering PCR, and several widespread efforts, including the Human Genome Project, have used the science to compile their databases.

WSJ: Art Emerges from DNA Left Behind

The drugs came courtesy of Kary Mullis, a Nobel prize-winning chemist, who described a new class of antibiotics that overcomes the resistance which has evolved in many species of bug.

ECONOMIST: How to party and learn at the same time

But it is impossible to imagine its wacky inventor, Kary Mullis, who accepted the Nobel prize dressed in a surfer's drysuit, flourishing in the stuffy constraints of Roche's Basle headquarters.

ECONOMIST: Pharmaceutical takeovers