By Deanna Isaacs
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
I looked at the illustration again. At the tip of the pen was a shiny little translucent purple nipple. “Polymerase Chain Reaction, the Nobel Prize winning discovery, has enabled us to exactly replicate Abraham Lincoln’s DNA,” the blurb continued. The name and address of the pen’s manufacturer, the Krone company, appeared at the bottom of the ad. The Great Emancipator’s genetic essence, captured in the tip of a fountain pen, was being sold from an industrial park in Buffalo Grove.
So Kronenberger was already thinking about collectibles based on actual people when John Reznikoff, a high-profile relics dealer and friend, bought ten strands of Lincoln’s hair at a 1993 auction, and maverick Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis created a company that replicates historic DNA for the commercial market. The Lincoln hair came from a bloody lock that was clipped by physicians attending the fallen president in order to get at his wound. It had been sold twice in the early 20th century and then hidden away in a sealed gold box until Reznikoff purchased part of it. Mullis, the surfer scientist who’s been in the news as a scheduled (but never called) witness for the O.J. defense and for his opinion that HIV does not cause AIDS, won the Nobel in ’93 for devising a rapid way to make a strand of DNA produce billions of copies of itself, an insight that made it possible to begin mapping the entire human genetic structure and to link Bill Clinton to the blue dress.
