CRUCIAL TOOLS IN NEW ERA OF SCIENCE
Author: By Robert Cooke Globe Staff
Date: Wednesday, October 15, 1980
Page: ?????
Section: RUN OF PAPER
The importance of the work done by Walter Gilbert, Frederick Sanger and
Paul Berg - all three named recipients yesterday of the 1980 Nobel Prize in
chemistry - is that they discovered the crucial tools that have opened up a
new era in biology and medicine.
Indeed, Gilbert said during a news conference yesterday that the exciting
progress being made now in the science called molecular biology would have
been impossible without these new tools.
Gilbert, 48, at Harvard University, and Sanger, 62, of Cambridge
University in England, had devised separate but equally useful techniques for
rapidly deciphering the exact chemical structure of a gene. This is known as
DNA sequencing, and it resembles identifying the chemical nature of each link
in a long chain of chemicals.
Berg, 54, at Stanford University, was the first scientist to construct
what is called a "recombinant DNA" molecule, meaning he spliced genetic
information taken from one living organism into the genetic material from
another.
In this work, Berg used what are called "restriction enzymes," which are
chemical tools that are used by living organisms to cut DNA apart and stitch
it back together again. With these enzymes, then, biologists are able to alter
the genetic instructions in living organisms.
Genes are the tools used to build and control living creatures. The genes
- which are basically a set of chemically coded instructions - are carried on
chromosomes, which are made up of a long, twisted ladder-like molecule called
DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid. The genes, then, are the basic carriers of
hereditary information, which is passed on from parents to offspring.
In higher animals, this genetic information is carried primarily in each
cell's nucleus - with each cell having a complete set of these genetic
instructions. Individual genes are apparently "turned on" when needed, then
"turned off" when not needed. The individual cells then make different
products according to what the genes command.
Gilbert and Sanger's discoveries have handed researchers a way to work out
the exact chemical structure - link by link - in the DNA molecule. This has
allowed scientists to begin comparing individual genes, study their structure
and determine - to some degree - how they are turned on and off.
"Everything we're doing today would be impossible without the DNA
sequencing techniques and the recombinant DNA techniques," Gilbert said. "All
around the world people are using these tools now, trying to attack everything
at once. The work is going in in private companies, in university and medical
school laboratories" and in government laboratories.
The most widely publicized results of such work so far have involved
"genetically engineering" tiny bacteria to make products normally made by
human cells. These include human insulin, human growth hormone, human
interferon and numerous other useful substances. Only the insulin produced by
bacteria, however, has gone into clinical trials - in England - at this point.
Most of the researchers in this area, however, are excited about the
future possibilities. A conference on this topic, indeed, was being held at
MIT yesterday when the award of the Nobel Prize in chemistry was announced.
Conferees - mostly scientists, research administrators and financiers - were
exploring the broad range of industrial possibilities opened up by this
recombinant DNA work.
A whole new industry, in fact, has been spawned by this research work, and
new small companies - some with molecular biologists at the helm - have sprung
up rapidly in the past few years.
The new companies - backed, frequently, by major corporations - are
looking into production of hard-to-get human hormones, valuable new vaccines
against disease, especially for protection of livestock, new fermentation
processes, and new sources of chemicals.
"This is still largely a basic science," however, Prof. David Botstein, of
MIT, said. "The things we can learn from DNA are, literally, at the frontier
of basic science. So the science is still in its infancy."
"We don't really have a good idea yet of what the payoff is going to be,"
Botstein added, but he said the situation is analogous to development of the
laser some 20 years ago. Results from laser light research have been exciting,
profitable and were largely unpredicted.
COOKE ;10/14,15:04 MFEENE;10/16,12 B07981796
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