Genentech is about the history of the company that birthed commercial genetic engineering. Genentech is unique in that there’s a lot of written and oral records of the beginning of the company. Normally that gets lost in the frantic beginnings, where everyone’s more worried about getting funding and shipping a product than preserving history. Hughes paints a complete portrait of the complicated legal, commercial, and scientific beginnings of the biotech industry.

Genentech’s history seems like a sequence of increasingly serendipitous coincidences. Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen happened to be working on complementary areas—Boyer on restriction enzymes and Cohen on plasmid DNA. Cohen and Boyer ended up sharing some of their findings with one another, which led to the two creating the first recombinant DNA—DNA that had non-native information stitched into it. Once the news broke, Robert Swanson, a venture capitalist, cold-called Boyer and the two hit it off. That started Genentech.

Genentech was unique in its time: they used the first recombinant DNA protocols to treat bacteria as factories to manufacture pharmaceuticals. Its business is genetic engineering, which is where the name comes from (genetics engineering technology). The main one we know now, and the one that made Genentech a household name, is insulin. It’s an incredibly powerful and beautiful technology. Instead of doing all the work to make the biologic yourself, you just have to put the instructions inside a cell. Then the cell does it all for you, and you can reap the benefits. It’s hugely influential in the biological fields today. At the time, most researchers thought it would be another decade or so until the technology was ready for industry use.

I use this technology almost every day in the lab. Recombinant cloning is the bread and butter of modern molecular biology and biochemistry. But this technology is barely 50 years old; it was invented in 1973 at Genentech! I really do take it for granted just how easy it is to design something and order synthetic DNA for cloning and experiments. The rest of the recombinant DNA technology was invented in the 1970s too. It’s astounding just how far the field has come in the past half-century.

Makes me excited to be a part of it.