GENETICS × TECHNOLOGY

Recombinant DNA and Genetic Engineering

1973 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

In 1973, Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer made bacteria replicate DNA assembled from different organisms, the founding act of genetic engineering.

Recombinant DNA is a DNA molecule formed by assembling sequences from different organisms. Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer obtained its replication in bacteria in 1973, founding genetic engineering. Three tools are necessary. Restriction enzymes cut DNA at determined sequences and leave complementary ends, which pair spontaneously; a ligase seals the cut; the whole is introduced into a plasmid, a ring of DNA that bacteria exchange among themselves and copy as they multiply, so that the culture reproduces the foreign gene. The Asilomar conference, convened in 1975 after a voluntary suspension of the most uncertain experiments, established the first safety rules under which work resumed. The Genentech company was founded in 1976; human insulin produced by bacteria constituted its first product.

Why it matters

All drugs, crops and industrial micro-organisms issuing from genetic engineering proceed from this technique. Asilomar remains the precedent invoked, and contested, in matters of self-regulation of a scientific discipline by its own practitioners: debates on genome editing and synthetic biology take up its vocabulary and its questions, namely who determines the acceptable level of risk and to whom the benefits fall.

Dating & uncertainty

The Cohen and Boyer technique dates from 1973, the decisive cloning experiment having been conducted with John Morrow. Recent historiography reads Asilomar less as a settled consensus than as the opening of a lasting negotiation between safety, regulation and commercial interests.

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:4514.5 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day