The two months in 1980 that shaped the future of biotech
By Henry T. Greely,
STAT
| 10. 17. 2020
In the course of just under two months that started 40 years ago this week, five events occurred that shaped the biotechnology industry and bioscience research. Looking back on these seminal events is a reminder of the odd ways in which change happens.
Event 1: A Nobel Prize
Early in the morning of Tuesday, October 14, 1980, the phone rang at Paul Berg’s house in Stanford, Cal. The jangling phone worried Berg and his wife because Berg’s father was old and ill, and they feared the worst. Instead, Berg heard the voice of his Stanford colleague, Arthur Kornberg, telling him that Paul had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. The Swedish Royal Academy had been unable to find Berg’s unlisted phone number, but one of Kornberg’s sons had heard the news very early in the morning on the radio and called his father, who called Berg.
Berg won half of that year’s prize for basic research into nucleic acids and for “certain aspects of recombinant DNA.” The other half was shared by Frederick Sanger and Walter (Wally) Gilbert for...
Related Articles
Not the species, certainly, but the Institute of that name, which was founded by transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2005 as a research group at Oxford University. According to a recently posted Final Report, its goal was “to pursue the big questions in a transdisciplinary way” by pulling together “researchers from disciplines such as philosophy, computer science, mathematics, and economics.” This evolved before long into the study and promotion of “effective altruism” and “longtermism” as...
By Tristan Manalac, BioSpace | 04.02.2024
Verve Therapeutics has suspended enrollment in the Phase Ib Heart-1 study evaluating its lead gene editing program VERVE-101 following a serious adverse event, the company announced Tuesday.
A patient, who received a 0.45-mg/kg dose of VERVE-101, developed a grade 3...
By Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, First Monday | 04.14.2024
The stated goal of many organizations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), an imagined system with more intelligence than anything we have ever seen. Without seriously questioning whether such a system can...
By Harold Brubaker, The Philadelphia Inquirer | 04.04.2024
Acompany started by University of Pennsylvania scientist Jim Wilson has received FDA approval to test a form of gene editing in infants for the first time in the United States, the company said Thursday.
The Plymouth Meeting company, iECURE, is...