Let's mouth-pipette a toast to the good old days...
'It was Woese’s new approach to doing phylogeny that produced this completely unexpected and very newsworthy result. His method, which seems impossibly tedious now that we can sequence whole genomes over lunch, involved dangerous amounts of radioisotopes, highly flammable solvents, and weeks to months of effort to produce, for any cultured microbial species, an ‘oligonucleotide catalog’. '