Paul Berg, pioneer in gene splicing who led way for biotech, dies at 96

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Dr. Berg, too, had worries. He paused his experiments with SV40 and E. coli, uneasy over intersplicing the DNA of a disease-causing virus and a common intestinal bacteria. Many of the ground rules set by the conference have been revised or dropped as researchers developed greater understanding of genetics. Yet in hindsight, the worst-case thinking of the early years was merited, many researchers say.

“It was a reflection of the Vietnam era and earlier history,” Waclaw Szybalski, then a professor and geneticist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told Science News in 1985. “Physicists were guilty of the atomic bomb, and chemists were guilty of napalm. Biologists were trying very hard to be guilty of something.”Article content

That also brought major commercial opportunities for what became the biotech industry, ranging from genetically modified crops to hundreds of drugs and therapies. The early products in the 1980s included vaccines for types of hepatitis and insulin. Previously, insulin from animals such as cattle and pigs were used in human treatment.Article content

Dr. Berg did not patent his findings, allowing pharmaceutical companies and other researchers to advance his work.Paul Berg was born June 30, 1926, in Brooklyn as one of three sons of a father who worked in clothing manufacturing and a mother who was a homemaker. In high school, his interest in research was first kindled by a woman named Sophie Wolfe, who ran the science club after classes, he recounted.

Source: News Formal (newsformal.com)

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