COVER STORIES
And profiting from gene splicing
The whole affair left Wall Street slightly dazed. Within minutes, the new stock leaped from its offering price of $35 a share to $89. As thousands of buyers bid for a piece of the action, brokerage houses had to resort to strict rationing. When a Beverly Hills matron demanded 100 shares, her broker apologetically explained that he could give her only two.
Such was the speculative fever when an obscure company named Genentech came to the over-the-counter market with a $36 million stock offering last fall. Veteran traders had never seen such commotion over an embryonic company, which had only 140 employees, sold no product to the public and showed a profit for just one year, at a rate of 2¢ per share. In fact, Genentech is only one of a growing number of similar companies just coming into existence that offer little more than vague promises of scientific things to come.
But what promises, what dazzling things to come—a new alchemy that may one day turn the basest of creatures into genetic gold. That alchemy is already capable of making new drugs like the antiviral agent interferon, a possible weapon with which to attack cancer. In the future, it may produce vaccines against hepatitis and malaria; miracle products like low-calorie sugar; hardy self-fertilizing food crops that could usher in a new "green revolution"; fuels, plastics and other industrial chemicals, out of civilization's wastes; mining and refining processes to relieve Malthusian anxieties about a future without sufficient raw materials.
Such things now seem within man's reach through the commercial adaptation of gene splicing, or recombinant DNA (for deoxyribonucleic acid). It is a genie capable of transforming the world—a genie that, scientists hope, the world will never want to put back into the bottle.
In recent years, scientists have also developed other techniques in genetic engineering. Most aim at modifying the hereditary mechanisms of microorganisms or cells for purposes of research or commerce. Others include the fusion of cells, DNA synthesis and the creation of hybridomas, long-lived cells that are designed to produce pure antibodies for use against disease. But of all these marvels, it is gene splicing that scientists consider the most exciting. Says the University of Zurich's Charles Weissmann, 50, who last year became the first scientist to make bacteria produce a facsimile of human interferon: "Biology has become as unthinkable without gene-splicing techniques as sending an explorer into the jungle without a compass."
Gene splicing is the most powerful and awesome skill acquired by man since the splitting of the atom. It is an unparalleled exploratory tool for examining, and in the process changing, the complicated machinery of heredity. If a gene of unknown function is inserted into bacteria, it can act as a probe that lets scientists see precisely what it does. By such techniques, researchers will finally speed up the formidable task of identifying, locating and analyzing every one of the more than 100,000 genes found in a human cell.
Already, for the first time, scientists can tailor simple living things. They can do this not just by cleverly mixing different strains, as in the slow and ancient process of crossbreeding roses or dogs, but by