 Mullis was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993 for his invention, seven years after he and his colleagues at Cetus first put his proposal to practice.Mullis's 1985 paper with R. K. Saiki and H. A. Erlich, “Enzymatic Amplification of β-globin Genomic Sequences and Restriction Site Analysis for Diagnosis of Sickle Cell Anemia”—the polymerase chain reaction invention (PCR) – was honored by a Citation for Chemical Breakthrough Award from the Division of History of Chemistry of the American Chemical Society in 2017.At the core of the PCR method is the use of a suitable DNA polymerase able to withstand the high temperatures of > required for separation of the two DNA strands in the DNA double helix after each replication cycle.