Editors’ Pick: Contamination has always been the issue!

In the middle of the 1980?s, I heard a highly profiled professor making a comment after a lecture about a brand new technique, the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). His comment was full of doubt about this novel technology, and the message was something like: ? it [PCR] can never become a widely used diagnostic tool due to the unavoidable contamination? . However, the PCR revolutionized life sciences from medicine to conservation genetics, the inventor was awarded with the Noble Prize, and many of us made careers using the very technique. Scientists, clinical diagnostics and forensic laboratories and others using PCR quickly learned to deal with contamination and build mechanisms to monitor for it. The contamination was there, but, it could be managed with the right laboratory environment, sample flow, and careful experimental design including proper sample handling and a set of controls.