Word: insulin
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Macy Koehler, biohazards safety officer for the University, said yesterday that DNA transfer enables researchers to isolate a segment of DNA with specific qualities, mass-produce it, and then study it for such practical mechanisms as insulin production, or cell reproduction...
...important step in this direction had already been taken last spring when scientists at the University of California in San Francisco succeeded in transplanting a rat insulin gene into the DNA of a laboratory strain of the bacterium Escherichia coli. The bug then multiplied into countless duplicate bacteria, each containing the insulin gene, but incapable of producing insulin. In the work announced last week, Microbiologist Herbert Boyer of the University of California, San Francisco, along with Biochemist Arthur Riggs of the City of Hope Medical Center near Los Angeles and Physiologist Wylie Vale of the Salk Institute in San Diego...
There was an immediate-and surprising-payoff. Yalow and Berson found that most adult diabetics did not have a shortage of the hormone insulin in their blood. Rather, it was present in abundance; only its sugar-metabolizing action was somehow blocked. Subsequently, Yalow and others developed similar RIAS for detecting human growth hormone, hepatitis virus and other biological substances. Today the RIA technique is used by labs around the world...
Scientists would rather not go slow, however. And the discovery made last spring by a group of scientists in California involving a new gene for producing insulin angered a group of Harvard scientists who were working on the same project but who lacked the facilities to perform similar experiments, illustrating the competitive nature of the field. Scientists in the Harvard laboratories uttered bitter sentences when asked for a response to the California discovery. "The only reason we couldn't get those results was because we didn't have a P-3 facility to clone the gene," one scientist said, adding...
...experiment generated a great deal of interest because it hints of a possible future use of recombinant DNA research to produce human insulin, needed especially for treatment of diabetes...