In 1999, Bert Vogelstein and Kenneth Kinzler coined the term “digital PCR” and showed that the technique could be used to find rare cancer mutations. However, dPCR was difficult to perform; it was labor intensive, required a lot of training to do properly, and was difficult to do in large quantities. In 2003, Kinzler and Vogelstein continued to refine dPCR and created an improved method that they called BEAMing technology, an acronym for “beads, emulsion, amplification and magnetics.” The new protocol used emulsion to compartmentalize amplification reactions in a single tube. This change made it possible for scientists to scale the method to thousands of reactions in a single run.