Every diagnosis, food-safety check and biosimilar release depends on a lab, and on inventions that were once somebody's bright idea. Here are the stories behind the methods we run every day, the genomics labs that shaped the field, and the lab professionals who quietly keep healthcare working.
Small facts about a big, mostly invisible part of healthcare.
A widely quoted estimate says about 70% of medical decisions depend on laboratory results. The exact figure is debated, but diagnosis, treatment choice and follow-up all lean heavily on the lab.
Most patients never meet the scientists who run their tests. Medical laboratory professionals work behind the scenes, and every April, Medical Laboratory Professionals Week ('Lab Week') is set aside to recognise them.
A single lab report passes through many hands: sample reception, extraction, the assay, instrument QC, data analysis and a final sign-out by a qualified reviewer.
Clinical labs check themselves constantly. Control samples run alongside patient samples, and external proficiency schemes send blind samples so a lab can prove it gets the right answer.
Every blood transfusion depends on a lab discovery. Karl Landsteiner described the A, B and O blood groups in 1901 and won the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for it.
In the early 1960s microbiologist Robert Guthrie developed a blood-spot test for phenylketonuria. The heel-prick 'Guthrie card' became the basis of newborn screening around the world.
The Pap smear, developed by George Papanicolaou, led to large falls in cervical-cancer deaths wherever routine screening was introduced. A glass slide and a trained eye changed public health.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was the first person to describe bacteria, which he called 'animalcules', in the 1670s. He saw them through single-lens microscopes he made himself.
Hans Christian Gram devised his staining method in 1884. More than 140 years later, the Gram stain is still one of the first tests run on a bacterial culture.
Stretched end to end, the DNA in one human cell would measure about 2 metres. It fits inside a nucleus only a few micrometres across.
Any two people share about 99.9% of their DNA sequence. The remaining 0.1% is a few million positions, and that is where genetic testing looks for answers.
The Human Genome Project ran from 1990 to 2003 and cost about US$2.7 billion. Today a whole human genome can be sequenced in a day or two for a few hundred dollars.
In 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick described the DNA double helix. Their model drew on X-ray images made by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling, including the famous 'Photo 51'.
Frederick Sanger is one of very few people to win two Nobel Prizes: in 1958 for sequencing the protein insulin, and in 1980 for his method of sequencing DNA.
Each PCR cycle roughly doubles the target, so about 30 cycles turn one DNA copy into around a billion. That is why PCR can find a pathogen in a tiny swab.
Bacterial antimicrobial resistance directly caused an estimated 1.27 million deaths worldwide in 2019 (The Lancet, 2022). Lab testing is how resistance gets detected, tracked and treated with the right drug.
Pakistan carries one of the world's highest burdens of beta-thalassaemia, with roughly 5–7% of people carrying the trait. Carrier screening and prenatal molecular testing help families make informed choices.
Finding a BRCA1 or BRCA2 variant can change a cancer patient's treatment. Tumours with these variants can respond to PARP inhibitors, so one lab result can open a whole treatment option.
From the humble micropipette to billion-read sequencers, in the order they were invented, with a note on where each one shows up at NCRO.
Tiselius used an electric field to separate serum proteins by charge. Agarose gels for DNA followed in the 1970s, and fragments still line up by size just as he showed.
Tired of mouth-pipetting tiny volumes, Schnitger built a piston-driven pipette with a disposable tip. Eppendorf began selling it in 1961, and it is now the most-used tool in any molecular lab.
The first dynamic-programming method for aligning two biological sequences. It guarantees the best-scoring global alignment and taught bioinformatics how to compare genes.
Replacing radioactive labels with an enzyme that produces a colour change made immunoassays safe, cheap and easy to automate. Two teams arrived at it in the same year.
Fusing an antibody-making cell with a myeloma cell produced a 'hybridoma' that makes one identical antibody indefinitely. Today's biologic drugs trace back to it.
Chain-terminating dideoxy nucleotides stop DNA copying at each base, and the fragment lengths spell out the sequence. Nearly 50 years on, it is still the accuracy benchmark for confirming variants.
By comparing 16S ribosomal RNA, Woese found a whole third domain of life, the Archaea. The same gene is now the standard way to identify bacteria.
Mullis came up with PCR during a night drive in California. It became practical with Taq polymerase, a heat-stable enzyme from Thermus aquaticus, a bacterium found in Yellowstone's hot springs.
Four coloured dyes replaced radioactive labels, so a machine could read the sequence. Its capillary descendants did most of the work on the Human Genome Project.
A primer whose 3′ end matches only one allele will only amplify that allele. It is a fast, inexpensive way to genotype a known mutation without sequencing.
A fast way to search one sequence against every known sequence. The original paper is one of the most cited in all of science.
Holland showed that Taq's 5′-nuclease activity could cut a labelled probe during PCR. Higuchi's team then watched amplification happen live, and real-time qPCR was born.
Free, open primer-design software that became a standard. NCBI's Primer-BLAST is built on it.
Reversible-terminator chemistry reads millions of DNA clusters at the same time. Illumina bought Solexa in 2007, and the method now produces most of the world's sequencing data.
Hebert proposed a short stretch of the mitochondrial COI gene as a 'barcode' for animal species. It is now the basis of meat and seafood authentication.
Saturating DNA dyes and precise melt curves reveal single-base differences in a closed tube, with no sequencing needed.
Rolling-circle copies of each DNA fragment are packed as 'nanoballs' onto a patterned chip. BGI acquired Complete Genomics in 2013 and built the DNBSEQ platforms on the method.
The institutes that sequenced the human genome, built the databases every lab searches and invented the instruments we still use.
Tell us what you need to test. Our scientists will design the workflow, and our free Biotools let you explore genes, primers and pricing first.