Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
in the latter enterprise are clear that mapping genomes is only one step
in understanding them.
Just as genes and genomics are not the same thing, so too, genes and
DNA are not the same thing. Indeed, DNA plays the intermediary role
between genes and genomes in the story we are telling. The major shift
that has eventuated in the invention, discovery, and mapping of genomes
during the later 1990s arguably began with the shift from genes to DNA.
Following the great discoveries of the 1950s and 1960s in which the fun-
damentals of the double helix and genetic code were painstakingly made,
the 1970s and 1980s saw the invention of a series of technologies
devoted to manipulating DNA (regardless of its function); the most
important were DNA sequencing, cloning DNA in bacteria, and the poly-
merase chain reaction (referred to as in vitro cloning), a technique that
enabled the rapid, efficient, and inexpensive production of large quanti-
ties of specific DNA sequences. With the invention of the polymerase
chain reaction at Cetus Corporation, a scarcity of DNA available for
experimentation turned into a bounty of DNA available for experimen-
tation.
7
The 1970s and 1980s were also the decades during which the
material conditions for the production of truth in molecular biology, bio-
chemistry, and genetics were undergoing, not coincidentally, equally sig-
nificant changes. These were the decades of the emergence of the
biotechnology industry—the end of an elite, artisan craft culture in
molecular biology and its rapid replacement with a distinctive type of
heavily machine-mediated, costly mode of quasi-industrial production,
replete with a much larger and more functionally diverse labor force
including computer technicians, lawyers, CEOs, and advertising agen-
cies. Joining the crowded world of DNA was another new player, bioethi-
cists. While companies such as Genentech, Cetus, and Biogen were
shaping the field, the university world was itself moving significantly
closer to this new industrial mode of operation. By 1989, it was daring
but plausible for the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Department
of Energy (involved in radiation research since the dropping of the
atomic bombs on Japan) to announce a human genome initiative,
designed to map (and eventually sequence) the human genome—defined
ambiguously as the total complement of DNA in a human cell—and
thereby to bring health and prosperity—eventually—to many.
8
Coinci-
dentally, 1989 was the year of the fall of the Berlin wall.
