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A Dream Postponed
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18977 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1991 |
2,490 Words |
| Author
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Edward Paget
Edward Paget has spent 35 years in the pharmaceutical and
allied industries in scientific, managerial, and executive
positions, and has been an interested and sometimes involved
observer of the biotechnology industry from its inception. |
American entrepreneurs have done well with the concept that any novel perception of nature will inevitably lead to the development of useful and profitable products on which whole new industries will be based. While the concept has slipped a little in implementation in the last several decades, the dream still motivates a great many businessmen to start new industries, or to diversify old ones.
It was therefore not surprising that the revolutionary concept in biology known as biotechnology immediately conjured up visions of new industries that would create wealth by curing most human and animal ills, by developing new plants, by allowing higher yields of milk, and by making chemicals in new and nonpolluting ways. This was, and remains, a predominantly American phenomenon. Europe and Japan have lagged far behind America in the attempted commercialization of this new biology. The reasons for this are generally outside the scope of this review, but it may be that availability of venture capital was the most important factor, since there has been no shortage of scientific talent outside America.
The most attractive part of that vision was the belief that we were on the verge of cures for cancer, heart disease, and a great many other ills. Now, after a thousand press releases, dozens of start-up companies, innumerable public offerings of shares, and dozens if not hundreds of paper millionaires, none of this has yet come to pass, and little is in view for the immediate future.
The scientific and technical advances that inflated this South Sea bubble were truly staggering. Discoveries followed thick and fast upon the deciphering of the genetic code by Watson and Crick in 1952-53. The genetic code specifies how the fundamental chemicals of cells, the proteins, are to be constructed from simple building blocks. The code for a protein, known as a gene, can be isolated from cells or even be constructed chemically. It can then be transferred by feats of incredible technical skill to organisms such as bacteria or yeasts, which can be persuaded to make the desired protein in virtually unlimited quantities and in a form often indistinguishable from the natural material.
It soon became almost routine to identify a protein in a biological system and to devise a way of making it in lower organisms. Start-up companies announced lists of important control and defensive proteins as targets soon to be achieved, tested, and commercialized. It seemed that many diseases would soon be problems no
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