Word: boyers
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Genentech Inc. was co-founded in 1976, in South San Francisco, by Venture Capitalist Robert Swanson, 32, and University of California Biochemist Herbert Boyer, 44. The company now has a staff of 200. It has signed research agreements with several large pharmaceutical houses, including Hoffmann-La Roche and A.B. Kabi, and leads all gene-splicing firms by offering half a dozen products. Among them: several types of interferon, one of which is now undergoing clinical trials. Genentech is also collaborating with another leading drug company, Eli Lilly, on mass production of human insulin. Last week Genentech announced its latest gene...
Bitter legal disputes have already broken out. The University of California has sued Hoffmann-La Roche and Genentech on charges that a line of cells they use to produce a type of interferon was first created in the university's San Francisco labs (Genentech's Boyer was, and still is, a top researcher at U.C.S.F.). That case is still pending in the courts. But another squabble with the university has already cost Genentech $350,000, plus future royalty payments to the school. The money was awarded to the university for work done by one of its researchers on a hormone...
...biologists now enjoying the new prosperity point out that collaboration between universities and industry is neither new nor dangerous. Physicists and chemists, they note, have long worked for private firms?not to mention the Pentagon?with little complaint from their colleagues except, in retrospect, over the atomic bomb. Says Boyer: "Industry is far more efficient than the university in making use of scientific developments for the public good...
...posed by their experiments, two other scientists were planning an even more dramatic display of gene splicing. One of them was an intense biochemist named Stanley Cohen, 46, whose lab was only two floors below Berg's own quarters at the Stanford Medical Center research building. The other was Boyer, who worked just an hour's drive away at the University of California at San Francisco. Their partnership had emerged accidentally. In November 1972, after a long day of listening to scientific papers at a conference in Hawaii, they met in a Waikiki delicatessen for a midnight snack. Gossiping about...
Like Berg, Cohen wanted to insert new genes artificially into bacteria. But where Berg resorted to a virus as his transport system, Cohen opted for plasmids, which he had been studying in his lab. As he listened to Boyer's description of his work that night in Waikiki, however, Cohen realized that there might be a short cut. Boyer and his associates had found a so-called restriction enzyme that cuts DNA precisely at predetermined points, and performs this surgery in an especially helpful way: at each end of the severed, twin-stranded molecule, it leaves an extra...