On Sept. 19, 2013, Thomas Brock and Hudson Freeze received the Golden Goose Award for their discovery of thermus aquaticus in Yellowstone National Park which enabled scientists to employ the high heat necessary for the replication and study of its DNA. Once they were able to study and use DNA in this manner, scientists essentially created the field of biotechnology, which then made possible the genomics revolution.

The Brock and Freeze discovery has led to the ability to amplify copies of DNA through a method called polymerase chain reaction (PCR).