In 1978, a team including Arthur Riggs used recombinant DNA technology to insert the gene for human insulin into bacteria, allowing the bacteria to produce human insulin directly instead of extracting it from animal pancreases. The project, done at City of Hope and Genentech, was Genentech's first major undertaking and became a template for producing other proteins through genetically engineered bacteria, laying the foundation for modern biotechnology.
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The hosts note that simply transplanting a human gene into bacteria does not work on its own, since bacterial cells process foreign DNA differently, which is why recombinant DNA techniques developed earlier were needed to make the insulin gene function inside bacteria.
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This insulin project is described as the first example of a process later repeated for many other biotech products.
200 words · auto-generated from the episode video
1:04:35Arthur Riggs, Herbert Ber, and Dennis Clyde. They successfully synthesized the world's first recombinant human insulin. So, they wanted to make insulin and before you had to basically harvest it from like pancreas, animal pancreas. It was a hassle. It would be really nice if we could just like make it happen, right? Maybe we could make the gene for insulin, grow it in bacteria. Well, making the gene for insulin is not so easy because you can't just take the human gene and put it in bacteria. The bacteria is going to be like, I don't what's going on? Um, so they use recombinant DNA technology which was invented earlier in our timeline. And at the city of Hope and Genentech, this was
1:05:17Genentech's actually first big project. It's it established the foundation of modern biotechnology. Yeah, this it's the it's the first example of what is then rinse and repeat for a variety of other exactly >> use cases in the future 19 >> saved countless lives >> 100% 100% we're staying in 1978 trapped ion quantum control and the C not gate >> yes um this was David weinland at NIST also at um University of Colorado