On his blog, Keith Robison walks through the history of restriction enzymes — from the use of pBR322, to the blue and white reporting colonies of β-galactosidase, to polylinkers. He suggests that biology classes look at the pUC polylinker to find all the palindromes and bioinformatics classes write a program to design a polylinker with specific endonuclease sites — and remember that the first polylinker was designed by hand, on paper.