• DOI:10.1007/s13238-016-0271-8
• Corpus ID: 8512945

Ray Wu, fifth business or father of DNA sequencing?

@article{Xue2016RayWF,
  title={Ray Wu, fifth business or father of DNA sequencing?},
  author={Yu Xue and Yongbo Wang and Hui Shen},
  journal={Protein \& Cell},
  year={2016},
  volume={7},
  pages={467 - 470}
}

• Yu Xue, Yongbo Wang, Hui Shen
• Published 15 June 2016
• Education
• Protein & Cell

The first author, Yu Xue, first read about Dr. Wu in the ScienceNet blog written in 2008 by Prof. Yi Rao, an eminent Chinese neurobiologist, who has made a profound and lasting influence on the new generation of Chinese scientists, including us. Later, this essay was included in one of his published books, and we carefully read it again during the Spring Festival of 2015. One sentence was quite confusing to us, “The primer-extension approach developed by Ray Wu (Fig. 1) in 1971, is a key step of DNA sequencing, and deserves a Nobel Prize. At first we had to laugh at this comment and concluded that Prof. Rao must have been drunk or something when writing this, because all textbooks that we had been aware of stated Sanger sequencing as the first and most important methodology. On top of everything the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Dr. Frederick Sanger and Dr. Walter Gilbert “for their contributions concerning the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids” in 1980, and we strongly doubted whether it would make sense to raise such seemingly meaningless sentiment. Also, in the traditional Chinese culture, understanding the true meaning of someone’s words can be quite tricky. For example, for grant application, a reviewer’s comment stating “this project MAY be funded” should be always interpreted as “this project can certainly NOT be funded”. Thus, we concluded that Prof. Rao was being sensationalist in his blog.