Category: Consciousness and Evolution

In 1972, Stanley Cohen, a Stanford medical professor, and Herbert Boyer, a biochemist, sat down to dinner in a deli in Hawaii. They discussed how to combine their respective knowledge of gene splicing and cloning to create a method for engineering and manufacturing new genes. Within four months of working together they had spliced together DNA fragments from different organisms and cloned millions of copies using E. coli bacteria. Biotechnology was born. In 1974 they filed a patent application which was eventually approved. In effect, a judge had opened the...