Genetic engineers’ drug heralds health revolution

Press, 26 February 1983, Page 26

Genetic engineers’ drug heralds health revolution

By Paul Raeburn, Associated Press science writer, through NZPA New York It was 10 years ago when a casual conversation between two biologists in a Waikiki delicatessen led to the first manipulation of human genes, a milestone that offered spectacular promise in the quest to heal the sick. In 1982, that promise began to be realised. In October, the United States Food and Drug Administration approved for the first time a drug made by genetic engineering. The drug, synthetic human insulin, heralds a revolution in treatment of disease, a revolution that has capped recent news in science and medicine. The news in medicine was not all good, however. In perhaps the most troubling development of 1982 researchers at the national centres for disease control in Atlanta charted the spread of a menacing new illness in which the body’s defences crumble, allowing a variety of otherwise uncommon diseases to appear, including cancer. The illness, called acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or A.1.D.5., appears to be infectious, but its cause is unknown. The disease first arose in homosexuals, but soon spread to other groups and was recently found in a 20-mdnth-old infant who apparently contracted it from a blood transfusion.

Important advances were made in physics and astronomy — advances dealing with infinitesimal particles and with the largest structures in the universe. History was made at the University of Utah, where the world’s first permanent artificial heart was implanted in the chest of Barney Clark, aged 61, opening a new age of spare-parts medicine.

It was in biology, however, where the most noteworthy progress was made. The techniques for combining human and animal genes, conceived in the Waikiki delicatessen by Stanley Cohen, of Stanford University, and Herb Boyer, of the University of California, are now producing results. The two biologists were in Hawaii for a scientific meeting. Cohen told Boyer about a tiny loop of genetic material he had isolated that could be inserted in bacteria.

Boyer described an enzyme he had found that would clip that loop and allow a foreign gene to be inserted into it. The two techniques used together, they realised, would allow them to put a foreign gene, such as a human gene, into bacteria — and genetic engineering was born.

Last northern summer, British researchers reported that a nasal spray containing genetically engineered interferon could prevent many forms of one of medicine’s most perplexing foes, the

common cold. Gene-splicing techniques are also showing how cancer genes, which lie dormant in the body, can be triggered to produce’ tumours. Two new vaccines appeared in 1982. One prevents hepatitis, and has been recommended to doctors, dentists and others at high risk for the disease. The other is aimed at protecting livestock against foot-and-mouth disease. The first steps have been made toward the cure of genetic diseases. Researchers have treated sickle-cell anaemia with a drug that alters the function of the genes responsible for the disease, and they have treated thalassemia, another blood disease, in mice. Mice and fruit flies have been made to incorporate foreign genes using techniques that might some day be used to replace defective genes responsible for a variety of human ailments. Researchers at the University of California in San Francisco shook conventional thinking about genetics with the discovery of a protein they call a prion that appears to be able to reproduce itself even though it contains no genetic material. The significance of the discovery is not clear, but the discoverers of the prion (rhymes with neon) think it might be related to diseases based on so-called slow viruses, which remain latent for long periods before caus-

ing disease. Physicists were electrified in April by an announcement by a Stanford researcher that he might have detected a magnetic monopole, a particle that theory predicts should exist but which had defied all efforts to find it. The monopole is the fundamental constituent of magnetism. in the same way that the electron and the proton, found inside the atom, are the fundamental particles of electricity. In August, physicists in West Germany manufactured a new element in an atom smasher. The element, known as element 109 because it contains 109 protons and 109 electrons, is the heaviest substance discovered. While physicists muddled with the smallest items in the universe, astronomers discovered the largest structure yet found, a string of galaxies stretching halfway across the visible sky. The discovery is helping astronomers determine how the universe was formed.

In October, astronomers at the California Institute of Technology won a sort of informal competition by becoming the first to spot the returning Halleys Comet, last seen in the night sky in 1910. The comet, now about 50 million times too faint to be seen with the naked eye. should be clearly in view by 1986, the astronomers said.