Interviewee: Paul Berg. Paul Berg discusses the usefulness of recombinant DNA to isolate and study genes. (DNAi Location: Manipulation > Revolution > Players > Paul Berg > Why recombinant DNA is useful)

And that is the critical step, the recognition that you could take a complex mixture of a million different pieces of DNA and separate them physically one from another by putting them into a bacterial cell and allow the bacteria to amplify them. That's the origin of recombinant DNA, the real utility of recombinant DNA was the ability to cut pieces of DNA up with restriction enzymes, join them to a plasmid, put them into a bacterium and then separate the bacteria so you had different pieces of DNA.

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