At the time, Mullis was manually synthesizing oligonucleotide probes to help detect a sickle cell anemia mutation. He had grown tired of the laborious, error-prone manual approaches required to amplify and detect target genes and was contemplating ways to ease the mundanity of his work. In what has been described as an “ah ha!” moment in his silver Honda Civic, Mullis conceived of a method that relied on a cascading biochemical reaction that split (denatured) target DNA segments, which would then be combined (annealed) with complementary primers and then enzymatically processed by a DNA polymerase to create new DNA templates (this cascading reaction resulting in polymerized target DNA become known as a “Polymerase Chain Reaction” or “PCR”).