Word: group
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Walter Gilbert '53, American Cancer Society Professor of Molecular Biology, and his Harvard research team are working on the insulin problem. Gilbert has been using the MIT P-3 lab for the past year pending completion of the Harvard lab. This past July his group developed a bacterial strain which synthesized rat proinsulin, a modified form of insulin...
Itakura and his associates reported that, "Artificial genes that 'command' laboratory bacteria to manufacture human insulin have been synthesized." Rather than using natural animal genes for insulin, this group built an artificial copy of the human insulin gene in two short segments and inserted these separately into E. coli plasmids...
...short insulin segments were hidden in large bacterial cell proteins during synthesis and safely escorted from the cells but the group has had problems putting the two insulin segments together in the proper three-dimensional conformation...
Certainly, Gilbert's group is in competition with the California researchers but Gilbert smiles, hesitating to say that he is involved in a "race." The thrill of a good race appeals to him. Rather than being harmful to the research, such pressure probably stimulates better work, Gilbert says, adding, "It can be detrimental, or one can simply view it as part of the effervescence of the field of science. It's not a question of added pressure. I like to rush," he insists...
...Gilbert says that there is something less than total cooperation between the groups attacking the insulin problem. While techniques are traded freely and he has communicated quite a bit with the artificial DNA group, he has been out of touch with the other California group which is employing an approach like...