When a common problem meets an ingenious mind

Abstract

When the marvels of modern biological research are presented in the media, one image almost always appears: a person in a laboratory using a micropipette. This small but ubiquitous device has evolved into one of the icons of modern biotechnology, molecular biology, gene therapy, stem‐cell technology and cloning. The modern micropipette has achieved such high visibility for obvious reasons: it is without exaggeration, the most widely used instrument in biology and medicine. It enables the convenient and precise handling of very small liquid volumes, making it of paramount importance to most laboratory work, and has contributed significantly to the rapid progress of molecular biology. Despite its obvious importance, the micropipette has always been taken for granted and little is known about its origins. I therefore want to tell the story of the invention of the piston‐driven, plastic‐tip micropipette. This singular feat was accomplished in the late 1950s by Heinrich Schnitger, a German scientist and inventor (Fig 1). Schnitger drowned in 1964 and his mentor Theodor Bucher passed away in 1997, so it is no longer possible to obtain a personal account of his invention. I was a close witness to Schnitger's work on the micropipette and other inventions, which took place at the Institute of Physiological Chemistry at the University of Marburg, Germany. In addition to my personal recollections, I rely on Birgit Pfeiffer's excellent research on the development of the ‘Marburg pipette’ (Pfeiffer, 2004). > … [the micropipette] has evolved into one of the icons of modern biotechnology, molecular biology, gene therapy, stem‐cell technology and cloning Figure 1. Heinrich Schnitger at about 38 years of age. Courtesy of the Institute of Physiological Chemistry, Ludwig‐Maximilians University, Munich, Germany. Few people will remember how biologists handled microlitre volumes before the modern micropipette became available. On my arrival as a postdoc at the Johnson …