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Often, decades go by before scientific discoveries find their way out of the laboratory and into daily life. Because of its extraordinary potential, gene splicing could prove to be a dramatic exception. Developed in the 1970s at many academic centers, notably Stanford, Harvard and M.I.T., it is fast breaking out of the university research centers into the world of industry. To its boosters, it seems certain to be the technology of the 1980s, just as plastics were in the 1940s, transistors in the 1950s, computers in the 1960s and microcomputers in the 1970s.
The short-term possibilities of the new gene-splicing companies may have been overblown. In the field of medicine, the new chemical creations face lengthy testing by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration before they can be licensed. The application to agriculture will require a great deal of capital, to say nothing of enormous technological advances, before any plants and products can be turned out in sufficient quantities to transform the world. Says James Watson, who with Francis Crick won a Nobel Prize for unraveling the double-helix structure of DNA and ultimately making recombinant DNA possible: "Let's put it this way: I wouldn't buy gene-splicing stock for my grandmother."
But the prospects for long-term growth can hardly be over estimated. One research firm, International Resource Development Inc., of Norwalk, Conn., forecasts an annual market of no less than $3 billion in recombinant DNA products in the pharmaceutical area alone by 1990. Says Britain's usually reserved Economist: "Biotechnology is one of the biggest industrial opportunities of the late 20th century."
In view of such glowing hopes for doing good and making big dollars, it is not surprising that DNA companies, most of them privately held, are proliferating from coast to coast, particularly in California and the Boston-New York-Washington corridor. Even Watson's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., is planning a research company. Wall Street analysts disagree about which fledgling firms will become the Polaroid, Xerox or Texas Instruments of gene splicing, or indeed survive the infant industry's inevitable shake-outs and growing pains. But a handful seem to be well ahead of the pack, and have attracted wide interest in the fields of both science and industry:
Genentech Inc. was co-founded in 1976, in South San Francisco, by Venture Capitalist Robert Swanson, 32, and University of California Biochemist Herbert Boyer, 44. The company now has a staff of 200. It has signed research agreements with several large pharmaceutical houses, including Hoffmann-La Roche and A.B. Kabi, and leads all gene-splicing firms by offering half a dozen products. Among them: several types of interferon, one of which is now undergoing clinical trials. Genentech is also collaborating with another leading drug company, Eli Lilly, on mass production of human insulin. Last week Genentech announced its latest gene-splicing advance. In collaboration with scientists from the University of Washington, Genentech's