Microcosm_ E. Coli and the New Science of Life - Carl Zimmer [95]
“The world is given to us on loan,” Chargaff warned. “We come and we go; and after a time we leave earth and air and water to others who come after us. My generation, or perhaps the one preceding mine, has been the first to engage, under the leadership of the exact sciences, in a destructive colonial warfare against nature. The future will curse us for it.”
These attacks left the champions of genetic engineering stunned. The debate had become “nightmarish and disastrous,” Paul Berg declared in 1979. Stanley Cohen called it a “breeding ground for a horde of publicists.”
James Watson, as usual, was bluntest of all. “We were jackasses,” he said, looking back at his support of the 1974 moratorium. “It was a decision I regret; one that I am intellectually ashamed of.” It had led the public to distract itself from real threats with illusions of apocalypse.
“I’m afraid that by crying wolf about dangers which we have no reason at all to worry about, we are becoming indistinguishable from my two small boys,” he wrote. “They love to talk about monsters because they know they will never meet one.”
E. COLI, INC.
One figure noticeably absent from the debate was Herbert Boyer, the scientist who had triggered the genetic engineering controversy in the first place. He was busy hunting for companies and investors who could help him make money from his restriction enzymes. In 1976, he became a partner with a young entrepreneur named Robert Swanson. Each man ponied up $500 to launch a company they called Genentech (short for genetic engineering technology). Boyer had to borrow his share.
Boyer and Swanson set out to sell valuable molecules produced by engineered E. coli. They decided their first goal should be human insulin, for many of the reasons Irving Johnson had offered to the National Academy of Sciences. Boyer turned to Arthur Riggs and Keiichi Itakura at the City of Hope Hospital in Duarte, California, for help. Riggs and Itakura were among the first scientists learning how to build genes from scratch. When Boyer contacted them, they were in the midst of synthesizing their first human gene, which encoded the hormone somatostatin. Working with Genentech, Riggs and Itakura figured out how to add sticky ends to an artificial somatostatin gene and insert it into a plasmid. They put the plasmid in E. coli, which then began to produce somatostatin. It was yet another milestone in a very young science. In 1973, Boyer, Cohen, and Morrow had managed only to put a fragment of an animal gene in E. coli. Four years later, Genentech had E. coli that could make human proteins.
The scientists did not take long to savor the glory. After they announced their results in 1977, they moved on to insulin. Boyer knew he would have to move fast. Walter Gilbert, the brilliant Harvard molecular biologist, was trying to make insulin as well. But Boyer had a crucial advantage over Gilbert: Boyer’s DNA was artificial. Gilbert was trying to isolate insulin DNA from real cells, so his research was subject to the tight grip of government regulation. His team had to take extraordinary precautions and even flew to England to work in a lab set up for biological warfare research. Boyer could move faster because his DNA was not “natural.” Instead of isolating it from a cell as Gilbert was doing, Riggs and Itakura worked their way backward from the insulin protein to the sequence of the insulin’s gene. Free of regulations, Boyer won the race. On September 6, 1978, Genentech announced that its scientists had extracted 20 billionths of a gram of human insulin from E. coli.
Over the next two years, Genentech researchers boosted the yield. They engineered E. coli so that it would push its insulin out of its membrane, making it easier to harvest. In 1980, Genentech was ready to hand over the production of insulin to Eli Lilly. The