Word: insulin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Because of this contamination, when the scientists tried to produce the genetic code for human insulin, they wound up with the code for rat insulin instead. The scientists have already successfully cloned rat insulin...
Gilbert and the team of scientists traveled to England to devise a method to make bacteria produce human insulin, an experiment which can only be performed in Britain because of less stringent regulations...
...Insulin is widely used for the treatment of certain diseases, but it is difficult to obtain and expensive now. If Gilbert's experiment had succeeded, he could have extracted insulin more quickly and much more cheaply...
...enough. But much harder was the job of getting the genetic instructions inside the potential bacterial factory, a weakened lab strain of the intestinal microbe Escherichia coli. The scientists resorted to a little molecular chicanery. Using their new gene-splicing or recombinant DNA techniques, they hitched their two synthetic insulin genes individually to one of the bacterium's own genes. Then they inserted both the synthetic and the natural material into fresh E. coli. As a result, E. coli's DNA-reading machinery was unable to distinguish the foreign genes from its own and began ordering up production...
Much more research is required before bacterial-made insulin reaches the retail pharmacy. City of Hope Diabetologist Rachmiel Levine suggested that this might happen in two to five years. Eli Lilly & Co., which produces most of the insulin now used in the U.S., shied away from such optimistic projections but announced an agreement with Genentech to begin a program for mass-producing insulin with the help of the tiny bacteria...