The story of the Cohen-Boyer patents

摘要

In 1972, Stanley Cohen, then an associate professor of medicine at Stanford University, and Herbert Boyer, a biochemist and genetic engineer at the University of California at San Francisco, met at a conference on bacterial plasmids in Hawaii and got interested in each other's work. Boyer's team had isolated an enzyme that could cut DNA strings precisely into segments that carried the code for a predetermined protein and such segments could also be attached to other DNA strands. Cohen, on his part, had developed a method for introducing antibiotic-carrying plasmids into certain bacteria, as well as a method of isolating and cloning genes carried by the plasmids. A collaboration ensued in which Boyer's enzymes allowed Cohen to introduce specific DNA segments to plasmids, and then use the resulting plasmids as a vehicle for cloning precise, previously targeted strands of DNA. Within four months they had a breakthrough. They had succeeded in cloning predetermined patterns of DNA. The technique of recombinant DNA was born. Their paper (including two other co-authors) was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA in 1973.