To my knowledge, Saiki et al. [2], in an important early study
of PCR published in 1988, were the first to use this approach. They
limit diluted a sample of genomes containing B-globin genes in a
sample of genomes from which the -globin gene had been deleted,
and showed that single -globin molecules could be amplified and
detected. The frequency of positive amplifications when analysed
by the Poisson distribution suggested that virtually every -globin
molecule was amplifiable by the PCR. They were thus the first to
use PCR to isolate and analyse a single molecule but they did not