Seven years ago Professor Hamer was preparing to make a career change from a large corporation to a university setting. The corporation asked him, as a parting favor, to teach one of their technicians how to splice genes, a procedure that involves cutting DNA at specific locations into genetic fragments. He readily agreed. However, rather than simply teach a laboratory technique, he used the request as an opportunity to investigate a question that had been fermenting over the past few years of his research: How can different strains of MGA be identified?
Professor Hamer had both a practical reason and a theoretical reason for wanting to find an answer to this question. The practical reason was to enable him and other scientists to identify and distinguish laboratory strains of MGA. If laboratory cultures of MGA were contaminated, then it became imperative to identify and discount results from those cultures. The theoretical reason was based on a discrepancy between two knowledge sources: what was known about MGA from the work of others (conventional knowledge) and what Professor Hamer knew about MGA from his own research (personal knowledge).