Polymerase Chain Reaction Making DNA accessible Most people in molecular biology today are not old enough to remember pre-PCR. But try to do your job without it, and you will see what a difference that simple little technique has made. 'Polymerase Chain Reaction' is now a word in Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and if you put 'PCR' into Google, you get 18,000,000 hits. If you type in 'pcr