Biotechnology. A dynamic field creating new drugs for our hospitals and new foods for our tables. Today, biotechnology is a multi-billion dollar industry. But in the early 1970s, it was little more than a scientific experiment. In 1972, two scientists from different fields, Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer, combined their talents and laid the groundwork for experiments that forever changed the way we look at living things.
By the early 1970s, scientists had learned a great deal about genes and cells. The structure of DNA had been revealed by Watson and Crick, and its role in genetics was being uncovered. But there was still a great deal to be learned.
At the University of California in San Francisco, Herbert Boyer was one of the scientists probing the mysteries of the cell. Boyer's work focused on how particular sections of DNA could be cut by molecules called restriction enzymes. The cut DNA was left with two sticky ends.
Boyer knew that if he added another similar piece of DNA, DNA, it would join with the cut DNA forming a new molecule. This had been done in a test tube, but would the new DNA work in an actual cell? I was trying to put all the pieces of the puzzle together, but I didn't have all the pieces actually.
The other pieces were being gathered just 40 miles away at Stanford University. At the time that antibiotics were discovered, it had been thought that the end of infectious disease was in sight. But it soon became clear that bacteria could develop resistance to those antibiotics. And it was discovered initially in Japan and then in England that the genes that made bacteria resistant to antibiotics were carried by plasmids.
Plasmids are simply tiny circles of DNA. Most of the time they can be found living inside bacteria, hitching a ride, so to speak. But every now and then, a plasmid will leave a bacterium and hitch a ride with a different one, adding its genetic material to the new cell and passing along its antibiotic resistance. What we developed in my laboratory was a way to allow bacterial cells to take up naked plasmid DNA molecules and once taken up by the bacterial cell the plasmids replication machinery allowed the plasmid to reproduce itself. A significant accomplishment.
But Cohen wanted to do more than just move plasmids around. Even though we had found a way to introduce plasmids into bacterial cells, there was no way to rearrange them. that is no way until restriction enzymes became available. Restriction enzymes, exactly what Herb Boyer had been working on.
And Cohen's work with plasmids was the missing piece Boyer was seeking. In April 1972, Boyer and Cohen both attended a scientific meeting in Hawaii. It would be the beginning of a long and adventurous trip. I was very excited by Herb's talk and that evening a number of us took a walk. And Stanley and I got together and boom, we were just right on each other.
That was what he wanted to do and that was what I wanted to do. do he would send me plasmid i'd cut it up and religate it and send it to him he'd transform it it was an extremely exciting time we worked literally almost day and night things were too exciting for us to do He had very much sleep and it was a continual high. It was like realizing a potential for this technology and we'd just done the first experiment.
With their new technique, Boyer and Cohen could take a piece of DNA and splice it into a plasmid. The plasmid was then inserted into a bacterium. When the new cell multiplied, it replicated the new piece of DNA as well. After all these years, it sounds funny to think that we weren't certain at the time that one could in fact simply splice another piece of DNA into a plasmid and expect the plasmid to be able to replicate that, allow that foreign piece of DNA to replicate. But splicing genes was just the first step.
If the DNA included a human gene that produced a particular protein, the bacteria would produce the protein as well. They had discovered a way to manufacture human proteins. The promise of this technology to produce cures and treatments for a wide range of human diseases, such as diabetes and cancer, soon attracted the attention of the media.
Shortly... After our first paper on this work was published, I was interviewed by Victor McElhaney of the New York Times, who was writing an article about the work, and he asked me specifically, when did I think the first commercial products using these methods would be available? And I thought for a moment and said, oh, somewhere between five and ten years, and it turned out to be seven.
That product was human insulin. Today there are dozens of biotech companies producing a wide range of products, from new crops and foods to AIDS therapies and life-saving drugs. What started out as a simple scientific collaboration has now become a reality.
transformed medicine and health care. I think it's one of the basic features of mankind that he helped us follow man. You can either rescue a victim in a fire or you can help someone across the street or you can take something you do as a career and help alleviate the problems of mankind you can be a physician you can be a scientist and develop a new biotechnology drug but it's a component of man's nature to want to help people and when you can do it it's really very nice