Shaping the Future of Life

Others Who Stood In The Spotlight

Though they seldom command the daily headlines, scientists by their deeds sometimes possess the potential for the greatest impact upon the world's future. Consider such works as the green revolution, the transistor, antibiotics, computers: in the past few decades, all emerged rapidly and unexpectedly to alter the course of civilization. Last year a new technology, perhaps the most startling yet created by science, came of age: genetic engineering, the ability to alter the basic stuff of life.

No individual scientist symbolized the new maturity of this arcane art more than Herbert Boyer, 44, a curly-topped, rumpled-looking biochemist at the University of California at San Francisco. In the 1960s Boyer was taking part in antiwar protests in the streets of Berkeley. Last year he led a different type of demonstration: the parade of scientists who are taking gene engineering out of the laboratory and into the marketplace, where it promises a host of wonders, from new drugs and foodstuffs to pollution-gobbling bugs.

Boyer first came to public attention in 1973, when he and Stanley Cohen of Stanford University helped point the way to such miracles. They devised a relatively simple method for taking genes--which contain instructions for one or more inherited characteristics--out of one living organism and splicing them into the genes of another. The resulting hybrid, usually a variety of the common bacterium E. coli, then makes the substance ordered up by its new gene. So powerful a tool is recombinant DNA, as it is called, that the rapidly proliferating bugs can act like little microbial factories churning out great quantities of material.

Three years later, Boyer joined with a young entrepreneur named Robert Swanson, then 28, to exploit this amazing--and, in some eyes, dangerous--new technology. Only lately has their firm, Genentech Inc.. begun to turn a profit. But its prototype bacterial factories have been extremely busy. They have already produced half a dozen different substances, including insulin, human growth hormone and interferon, the antiviral agent being investigated as a cancer cure. Genentech (pronounced jeh-nen-tek) has also paid off handsomely for Boyer (his initial investment: $500). Offered publicly last October, its stock shot up within 20 minutes to $89 a share from an initial price of $35. Even near year's end, after it settled back to around $40, Boyer's own holdings were worth $37 million.

Though Genentech was the most prominent of the new biotechnology firms to go public, it is only one of many contenders in this rapidly expanding business, which got a strong boost last year by the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that new life forms are patentable. (The first gene-splicing patent was for Boyer and Cohen's work.) Nor is Boyer, who remains at the University of California, the only academician with commercial ties. In 1980 dozens of scientists signed up with gene-engineering firms.

Some of Boyer's colleagues carp that the Genentech connection has tainted his reputation as a "pure scientist." There has also been talk that it cost Boyer a Nobel Prize--one of the 1980 awards was shared by Stanford's Paul Berg for recombinant DNA research. But Boyer, whose only real ostentation is a new Porsche, has every reason to shrug off the criticism. After all, he argues, the full benefits of genetic engineering--say, the curing of diseases--can never come out of a university setting alone. "Business is more efficient," he says. "It will bring benefits to the public much faster."

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