The term “discovery” is outdated, and it does not truly characterize science as a process of hunting and finding; a process of unearthing something more massive than all of humankind. Although it sounds very grandiose and naive, I like to think of science as a sieve, and whenever a drop of knowledge drips through the cracks, humans have always stood below with a sponge trying to catch it. The unearthing of recombinant Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid (rDNA) technology, mostly by Paul Berg, Herbert Boyer, and Stanley N. Cohen, has sparked a revolution in the biotechnology industry, not to mention the possibilities for academic research in a bevy of other related fields. These polymaths and researchers who opened up many doors for the study of genetics by exploiting the structure of DNA proposed by Watson and Crick also opened a Pandora’s Box: they invited a major debate about the ethics of genetic manipulation and the effects that it might have. However, they lit the path towards a new era of science: the age of the genetically modified organism.
Recombinant DNA found its roots in Berg’s laboratory where he injected lambda viral DNA into the DNA of the SV40 virus, whose host was the monkey. He then used a restriction enzyme called EcoRI, an endonuclease enzyme from E. coli, to cut the looped DNA, and rejoined the DNA using a ligase. Doing so, he had found the primitive version of transformation, soon to be mastered on a plasmid, a self-replicating loop of DNA, in November 1972. Researchers had successfully inserted a sequence of DNA into a virus from another virus, a revolutionary concept to grasp at the time. In 1978, Boyer constructed a plasmid which contained and expressed the gene for the insulin protein, which was used by many pharmaceutical firms to harvest large amounts of the protein to use in diabetes medications.
There are many beneficial effects as well as drawbacks to the technology; however, biotechnology has been a growing field, reaching a market value of just under a $100 billion last year. In addition, over 100 biotechnology companies have seen their initial public offering (IPO) which raised about $9 billion. The main impacts of rDNA technology have been seen in its rising use in agriculture, medicine, and genetic research in molecular biology. Although it incorporated many beneficial vitamins such as vitamin A in food colloquially known as the golden rice, it has also caused many ethical controversies with respect to allergenicity to the organism from which the gene has been transplanted as well as a chance of horizontal gene transfer from the organism to humans—which have since been resolved. It has also proved to be a boon in medicine because researchers can diagnose diseases such as the human immunodeficiency virus and hepatitis B. Even further, scientists can produce clotting factor VIII as well as insulin to help treat diseases such as hemophilia and diabetes, respectively.
Finally, rDNA has had the greatest global impact on the world because it allowed humans to achieve a major way to change how we live our lives–through rDNA, we have been able to construct organisms that wouldn’t have been born in nature and have also been able to engineer different organisms for research purposes. Although we have released Pandora’s Box into the world and have a whole host of negative consequences to deal with, we also have hope that we can use this technology to our benefit in the future. rDNA, ostensibly, is the most important “discovery” in human history; it is a process which will continue to thrive in the years to come.